[CCIP]

Well, there is another complication here. A complex, 'deep' game automatically takes a bit more resources to develop - it's very hard to make complex games without a large team of people of different, often very specialized kind of knowledge. Likewise, a complex, 'deep' game also requires a particular kind of audience - often a patient one. With simulations especially (but not exclusively), the learning curve is extremely sharp and you generally have to spend a certain period learning - and in some sense, a period of being absolutely terrible and reaping no 'rewards' except for the learning experience itself. Only after you get through those lessons do you even get to properly play the game. The net result is that this tends to narrow the target demographic - only a few people might be interested in doing the homework on a technically complicated or historically remote topic.

The net result is that, as you might expect, here is the choice faced by publishers and developers: (a) you make a more complex, expensive game that requires more experts in unusual areas to develop, and you try to sell it to a smaller audience that is limited by experience, education, time and willingness to learn, and social pressures; (b) you make a simpler, less expensive game where you can turn expertise savings into a bigger art budget, attach some Steam/X-box Live/whatever achievements and points to it, and sell it to a much less restricted audience that doesn't really need any qualifications - as they say, easy to learn but hard to master, the maxim of every multiplayer shooter out there now.

I think it's clear which one is economically preferable.

But yeah, if there's one recent development in gaming that I am beginning to hate with a passion, it's "achievements". I know many, many, many people who have turned their gaming lives into nothing but obsessive achievement farming - and the game companies have realized that it sells. Increasingly, and paradoxically, games are beginning to regress even from the Michael Bay style cinematics and back to an even more primitive Pavlovian habituation. Because of my occupation and financial restrictions, I work and live with 20 year olds, many of whom game. For many of them, what I do - play games for the simming holy grail that is suspension of disbelief - makes no sense. They're bewildered at how I can play games that aren't about set goals or at least clearly defined stories. For me, what they do - constant achievement farming and poorly-written 'amusement park ride' games - makes even less sense.

So I am wondering if it is a generational thing to some extent. And that current generation really does worry me.