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Friday Fun Thread for March 14, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Piggybacking off of my last comment, are there others who feel that modern games seem not to be as fun as games from late 90s to late 2000s? This may be nostalgia talking, but people around me game less than they did, and most games they play are MMO ones, as opposed to campaign-focused ones like Half-Life.

I have not played a whole lot of modern games, but their gameplay does not seem to be that big of an improvement over things I have seen before. In many cases, modern shooters feel quite slow compared to arena shooters like unreal tournament or Quake. I was looking at games to play and very caught my eye beyond the new doom games.

I just re-opened my Everquest2 account. So...yes?

I don't play many modern video games anymore, probably for all the reasons. I thought Diablo 4 was absolute dog shit, No Man's Sky was boring, Gloomhaven was fun but ridiculously time consuming and pretty much every other game I turn on turns me off in the first 5 minutes. I just figure I'm getting too old for this stuff and now I just want to piddle around for an hour or two harvesting resources and grinding stupid, pointless quests for crap gear.

I think the single thing I hate most about all games in the past 10 years is the pathological need to turn everything into a story. I don't care about the plot, I don't care about the NPCs, I don't care about voice actors or dialog or the poetry of the stars. I want decent mechanics and an interesting gameplay, maybe hidden stuff or puzzles. I think the last game I really liked was Fez, though I played the Conan MMO for untold hours. I was playing Hogwarts Legacy with my kid, which isn't bad, but even that can't seem to hold our attention. All she wants to dink-donk around in Roblox and build little towns in Minecraft.

I mean, you’ve gotta have some sort of aesthetic context. Gaming minus aesthetics is just computer science problems. Like, yes, you could play Pokémon without all the cute animals and sound effects—it’s just a big chart, mechanically—but somehow I doubt anyone finds being handed the Serebii data dump is a comparable experience to "Pikachu, I choose you!"

And don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy computer science. But it’s not the same thing as gaming.

Well, there's story in video games and story in video games. John Carmack once compared the importance of story in video games to the story in porn. It's there, and it helps to set up the context and make things more interesting, but it's not the main point. Games like Doom or Super Mario Brothers had stories that set up the motivations of the player character and the context for why he was going around shooting demons or moving from left to right towards castles, but they largely melted away in the thick of the gameplay. Doom's story was told almost entirely through a few paragraphs in the manual, and then a few paragraphs at the end of each of the 3 episodes, with basically nothing in between. On the other hand, I feel like modern AAA games tilt towards trying to tell stories, with gameplay in between, such that the playing is broken up every hour or less by story beats. This can work when the story is well written and well told, but that's often not the case.