Remember the days when starting up your favourite games and playing it until the sun came up was the norm? When the “I’ll stop after this level” turned into 100% completion? All of this has seemingly faded away in today’s life. Single player has become a mode for when the internet is down, and picking up a brand new game has become more of a task than an ambition. There are many factors contributing to our gaming habits, let’s take a look at some of this biggest contributors.
With the average age of gamers coming in at 31, it is fair to assume that most gamers today have a lot of responsibilities that need to come before their favourite hobby, from earning an income to family duties, there is clearly just not as much time to game as there used to be. In fact, only 29% of gamers fall under the age of 18, and because of the busy information age we live in today even they don’t have the same amount of free time people of the same age had 10 or 20 years back. Everything is moving faster which translates to everyone needing to perform required tasks faster and at a higher volume, which in turn inevitably results in people having less time to do the things they enjoy.
You might be thinking that this just about sums it up, the age of gamers is the cause for the drastic change in all of our gaming habits. This is not the case, the average age of gamers is merely the tip of the iceberg. The way games are designed today mixed with a bit of human psychology, makes for a much bigger factor affecting our gaming habits.
Single player game modes seem to have taken the biggest knock when it comes to what games we prefer to delve into when we have a chance. It has been effected to such extent that you can find many titles on the shelves today which has decided to totally discard any form of single player mode. Titanfall was one of the pioneers “no campaign” games and became quite a success, already showing that offline play is not a necessity for a game to make a success. More recently the highly anticipated Star Wars: Battlefront followed the same path offering up a good story line for better multiplayer-centric gameplay. While Star Wars: Battlefront does have some sort of single player feature, it feels very neglected and people claim it to feel like playing a multiplayer mode against bots. Recently the latest release of the Call of Duty franchise was ported to last gen consoles. To make it possible certain features needed to be removed and thus the developers decided that the single player campaign was least necessary and took it entirely out of the game, once again showing that in the mind of the game developers single player modes are the lowest priority.
The way games get developed is not the only factor affecting our habits, our social and competitive nature is also a big contribution. The social aspect ties into the amount of time we have to dedicate to gaming in our lives. With the ease of online gaming today, it is much easier for gamers to gather with their friends in a game online than it is for them to gather at one friend’s house for a few hours of gaming, it is also a lot easier to meet new people with similar gaming interests. Competitively online gaming is entirely ahead of single player gaming. Anything from leaderboards to full on PvP fuels our needs to be the best at whatever we are doing. Comparing your campaign progress to that of a friend doesn’t come close to measuring performance and skill in a realtime equal environment, thus, the multiplayer environment in most games are tailored specifically to entice us as humans almost entirely negating the moments of joy single player modes used to bring us.
Now that we know exactly why we can’t seem to pick up a good single player game and play it beginning to end in just a few days, we need to find out why exactly gamers haven’t just shifted their time to online gaming instead and why the feeling of not being able to game as much as we used to, crosses all game types and platforms.
Online gaming, now more than ever, is one of the most time-consuming pastimes us as gamers can take on, not to mention its effect on our pockets. It doesn’t matter which game you prefer, it’s safe to say there will be noticeable grinding and farming involved if you want to achieve the end game goals. Whether it be cosmetic items for your weapons in FPS games or for the best gear you can get in your favourite MMORPG you will be spending most of your time killing thousands of enemies and farming exceedingly rare items to be able to obtain these items. You could take the microtransaction route to alleviate some (sadly not all) of the grinding from your online experience, but this is not a pocket-friendly option. GTA V is quite a good example of this. You can buy a Megalodon Shark Cash card for $100 – yes $40 more than a brand new AAA title – in exchange for $8,000,000 in game funds, something that will take weeks if not months to achieve by traditional mission grinding. The sad thing is that even with this massive amount of funds, you still won’t be able to afford half of the purchasable items the game has to offer and GTA V doesn’t even come close to other games out there when it comes to micro transactions.
When it comes to gaming today, most people do not have the time nor the money required to successfully achieve all the aspects a game has to offer, this causes less people to take on a new game knowing that if they don’t invest time and money they most likely won’t be able to play the game to its fullest.