Internet killed some part of the gaming fun

[volkanik_destruktor]

Nowadays, when internet is widely available with all this tubes, forums etc. a lot of gaming magic is gone. There is no longer 'mystery' in games, endings aren't as rewarding as they used to be, there's no place for game rumours of the past. Multiple endings was the way to make people replay the game and now there's is no point in doing that due to youtube's walkthroughs library. I miss the times when Mortal Kombat II was still fresh one and there were many speculations about hidden figthers, finishing moves and other secret content around - there was magic in it! And it's almost impossible now. Internet has also spoiled players with his load of game solutions - I've already gave up with whole adventure games genre beacause of this ubiquitous walkthroughs temptation that is hard do overcome. I feel like we've lost something in gaming, all stuff are too common and there's no place for more 'personal' exeprience.

 

It's just me or...?

Edited October 16, 2012 by volkanik_destruktor

[LidLikesIntellivision]

Personaly I never liked walkthroughs.

Before there were the magazines, I liked to see the new games but always skipped walkthroughs.

I just keep doing this. I simply don't watch walkthroughs. Depending on the game, I also don't like to watch other people playing!

 

But I agree with the rumours aspect. Secrets in games had a mysthical side.

 

Now, on the other hand, we have AtariAge! I can play with much more guys than before and I have access to much more games too.

I used to play with my brother, cousins and some friends but now I can play with more than 10 people! That's really great.

Not to mention I can STILL play with my brother thanks to internet!

Oh, of course, I can't let the games out. I used to have around 20 Atari games, 7 nes and 7 snes games.

In my Atari time, I was too young and I thought I knew too much Atari 'cause I had a huge 20 carts! Now I can download hundreds games and play in a real Atari with the Harmony, which I ordered internationaly with the help of Internet.

 

Oh, man. I really love internet.

[+Random Terrain]

If an adventure game creates new territory, similar to Civilization style games, and controlled randomness is used to mix things up and create items from various parts that even the programmer may not have thought of, it would be hard to create a walkthrough. Things would always be different and the ending would be different too.

 

Here's a semi-related link:

 

www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/FREEFALL.HTM

How did you algorithmically generate a complete "plot" every time you play?

 

Jon: We created eight distinct scenarios or master plots, each of which had between two and four independent subplots: e.g., a love triangle, blackmail, secret agent vs. spy, even a vampire. When a scenario was played, one subplot was randomly selected to be the real plot--the one involving that session's murder. The others automatically became red herrings. On a different occasion, one of the red herrings might become the real plot, and vice versa.

 

Additionally, each subplot had three or four roles and typically four sets of alternative casts to play them: for instance, philanderer, jealous spouse, lover, lover's jealous spouse. By reversing sexes and extending a "spouse" role to include a Significant Other, quite a range of characters could occupy the roles at different times. Further, within the same subplot, any role could be victim or murderer: the jealous spouse might kill the lover or the straying spouse--or be killed by either.

 

Half the dialogue was based on the nature of the characters, permanent relationships, and the general flavor of the scenario; the other half was assigned to specific roles. Since many statements referred to a character who might be male or female, alive or dead, even the simplest lines could get complicated: e.g., "He/she hates/hated her/him." Since we made heavy use of tokens to adjust verb tense and pronoun gender, the resulting encoded dialogue bore only a slight resemblance to normal English; it was hard to read, harder to proofread, and almost impossible to debug thoroughly.

 

 

Are you surprised that more games haven't used similar open-ended techniques?

 

Jon: I used to be. We tried hard to disguise our methodology, because we were initially concerned that many people would copy it. Now I think it's just too tricky for most people to tackle. It requires planning, care, and the ability to juggle an uncomfortable number of variations, and the work can only be shared by people who really understand the system. It helps to have designers with a grasp of programming and programmers who understand game design. Game companies have focused almost exclusively on hard-core gamers, who seem to prefer a forty-hour game to a half-hour game that can be replayed 100 times. "Normal" people have different preferences, but nobody except Microsoft seems to pay any attention to them.

[segagamer99]

Emulation does kill a lot of the surprise, but forums and eBay make finding games even easier and fun.

[PFL]

I watch gaming videos on YouTube most days of the week and I find there is plenty to watch without ever feeling the need to watch a walkthrough. In fact, I tend to find them a little boring. Watching them reminds me of being young and having to wait while my friend would be playing for ages... All I'd be thinking was "When can I have a go?!".

 

In the 'good old days' of, say, the 80's where could you find anyone interested in 'old' sytems or games? You couldn't. Magazines and telly were only concerned about the current generation and the future. There just wasn't any avenue to talk about old games. For all intents and purposes old systems died and that was it - onto the next shiny thing...

 

The content that's on the interwebs can be fascinating. There are real life interviews with people involved in the business I'd never hope to meet, there are blogs which allow me to share memories with others, there are forums like this one where I can find the answers to most of my questions but also allow mysteries to propagate or be discussed. Right now, I'm talking in a thread as to who owns Imagic. It's a bit of a mystery and nobody seems to know for sure (yet!) and it's great that I have somewhere that I can discuss these things.

 

I'm in Scotland and for whatever reason there is just nowhere to buy old games and systems (rather, anything older than NES). I have to rely on eBay and the like for my Atari purchases.

 

I understand your point but I think a lot of the magic and mystery comes from being a kid and now that we're grown up it's just not the same.

 

My nephews and nieces are enraptured by the potential and mystery of the Wii U, it's launch games, Nintendoland and any number of things pertaining to it upcoming release. Maybe we're just a little past it now...

[WispFollower]

I understand what you mean, but with some self control, you can forge your own experience to be as enjoyable as you desire. I find I enjoy games more if I leave the mystery in them by not looking up every secret, whether it is classic or modern. For example, I realize I can find out every place to get secret items or extra lives in old platformers, or the most powerful weapons and armor in games like Skyrim.. However, it becomes exponentially more rewarding to stumble across these things when using my own personally devised strategies. I may not always have the highest scores or be able to cut down every enemy I encounter with one blow while taking no damage, but those are not usually the reasons I am playing games to begin with. I prefer a massively difficult battle which I must use more of my brain as opposed to finding exploits and walkthroughs to beat a game as quickly as possible.

 

It reminds me of friends I had growing up. I would be all excited about beating games such as Goldeneye on N64, earning extra modes and cheats by playing on higher difficulty levels. They would just pop in the gameshark the first day they got the game and have access to every level, playing through while invincible and with no challenge whatsoever. How boring and unrewarding..

 

This is not to say I have never used a gameshark, walkthrough, or cheat... But I usually only do so after exhausting every way to enjoy the games without those things. For example, I have played many games to death. We are talking hundreds if not thousands of hours. After that, yeah maybe I'll turn on some hilarious cheats such as combining the two cheats in gta games- "give all pedestrians weapons" with "riot mode." I'm not putting down anyone who wants to cheat the moment they start playing a game, but it just isn't fun for me, and usually ruins the experience. Everyone has their own way of enjoying video games. Find yours and don't worry so much about what everyone else is doing.

[godslabrat]

I understand your point but I think a lot of the magic and mystery comes from being a kid and now that we're grown up it's just not the same.

 

This.

 

It's true that there was less information out there back in the day, but it's also true that an adult mind just works differently. We've seen enough to be able to guess where stuff would be hidden, or what might be out there, and we usually have at least a layman's idea of how the programmers accomplished it. We're jaded, which is unfortunate, but there's no shame in it. The alternative is to have learned nothing after 20+ years of gaming.

[StanJr]

I do miss the "mystery" that was created by rumors. Even late into the information age, there was rampant speculation about being able to get Aeris back in FFVII, and that was magic. But back in the "old days" something like finding out Simon's Quest had more than one ending pretty much meant I was going to play it for days or weeks until I had seen them all. Now I get lazy and when I beat Metroid Prime: Corruption and didn't get the best ending, I just looked it up and watched it. Snore. It's my fault, I know, but like the OP said, the temptation of access to information is sometimes too great.

 

I loved gossiping about games and then going home and trying to prove the myths and legends on my own. There was a time when the Konami Code was a myth in my small world.

 

I do my best to avoid walkthroughs and try to stay out of spoiler level discussions about games I am really interested in. For example, I passed, passed, passed on that Skyrim strategy guide (unabridged dictionary sized though it was). I was not about to ruin that experience!

[+Gemintronic]

The OPs opinion isn't wrong, but, it's a little like complaining that you miss being slim after all-you-can-eat buffets came out. Knowledge is knowledge. The difference is how you use it.

 

Being an informed gamer is wonderful. Without the Internets we wouldn't know that recent patches in XCOM secretly made the to hit percentages more fair. Wasn't in the patch notes.

Edited October 16, 2012 by theloon

[volkanik_destruktor]

I don't condemn internet, it's a great medium and its existance is a miracle but I try show also negative influence - you gain something on the one side but on the other there're some losses. It's not like there weren't walkthroughs in the past but i-net made them too easy to find - especially in their video form. Living adult life (having not so much time for games) enforces players to search shortcuts just to avoid being stuck in game (= loosing time) and it ruins any try to focus on game - and there is when net appears with its facilitation which is hard to defy. At least I can't discipline myself enough...

[+wood_jl]

I respect the original poster's opinion, but I think the internet is the best thing to happen to gaming. Discussing games, learning about new games (homebrew), discovering old games (I didn't know about), downloading entire libraries for flashcart or emulator use, locating old consoles I missed out on (that I'd never find in a local thrift store), and on-and-on.

 

It's stupid things like social networking (talking crap about NOTHING of substance), and junk e-mails (spam and forwarded lies (much of it political) and jokes that aren't funny) that I find to be the problem with the internet. For gaming (merely entertainment, but at least it is of SOME substance), I think it's great!

[retroillucid]

Seeing how the video games sales drop, I would not be surprised to see another crash

Yay! Can't wait!

 

 

[jaybird3rd]

I respect the original poster's opinion, but I think the internet is the best thing to happen to gaming. Discussing games, learning about new games (homebrew), discovering old games (I didn't know about), downloading entire libraries for flashcart or emulator use, locating old consoles I missed out on (that I'd never find in a local thrift store), and on-and-on.

 

It's stupid things like social networking (talking crap about NOTHING of substance), and junk e-mails (spam and forwarded lies (much of it political) and jokes that aren't funny) that I find to be the problem with the internet. For gaming (merely entertainment, but at least it is of SOME substance), I think it's great!

Yes. I think it's easy to forget how isolated individual hobbyists were in the years before the World Wide Web, when the information that most of us take for granted now wasn't so readily available.

 

I missed out on the BBS days, but I certainly remember my first exposure to the Web, in late 1996. I had already been an Atari owner for years, and I still had the consoles and computers I'd been using since they were new. But aside for those few items and a handful of old computer magazines, I was an "island": there weren't any Atari resources nearby, and I didn't know anyone who shared my interest in them.

 

With the Web, a whole new world of information opened up to me, and it totally revitalized my classic gaming/computing hobby. That was when I learned that Atari was officially dead, having "merged" with JTS earlier that year, but I also became aware of games that I hadn't seen before and hardware that I had missed out on, like the 7800 and the XE computer series. I also discovered emulation, and that really changed everything. Running MAME and other emulators on a PC for the first time, and discovering the bounty of ROM sites in the years before the IDSA and other organizations got hyper-vigilant about them, was nothing short of amazing.

 

There are certain things that I miss about the pre-Internet world, but I'd never want to go back to it entirely. Just learn to shut it all off and walk away from it sometimes, and stay away from social networking, and you can avoid most of the negatives without depriving yourself of the positives.

[raskar42]

Atariage wouldn't be the same without the internet.

[Austin]

My biggest complaint with the internet and gaming is how it has affected multiplayer sessions. Nobody seems to want to step outside of their house anymore and they would rather sit alone at home and talk into a microphone instead. Online gaming was truly novel when it was in its infancy (Quake, for instance), but it seems like there has been a complete shift and gaming locally with a group of friends is a thing of the past. Being there in person and being able to talk and interact with the people next to you is a lot more engaging to me than speaking into a headset to someone you can't even see on the other end.

[+Random Terrain]

Being there in person and being able to talk and interact with the people next to you is a lot more engaging to me than speaking into a headset to someone you can't even see on the other end.

 

But other gamers have bad breath and are deodorant challenged. Maybe it's best if they stay home.

[OBO]

Seeing how the video games sales drop, I would not be surprised to see another crash

Yay! Can't wait!

 

What, they intend to release E.T. for the Xbox 360 ? (just kidding. If there's a crash, it will come because people will get bored of playing always the same FPS, with different graphics only each time)

[retroillucid]

 

 

What, they intend to release E.T. for the Xbox 360 ? (just kidding. If there's a crash, it will come because people will get bored of playing always the same FPS, with different graphics only each time)

 

Yep, like people were bored playing the same games over and over again in the 80s

Edited October 23, 2012 by retroillucid

[+Gemintronic]

Before the Internet I almost didn't buy Zelda because of this line in the advertisements:

Welcome to the Legend of Zelda. Where the only sound you'll hear is your own heart pounding as you race through forests, lakes, mountains and dungeonous mazes in an attempt to restore peace to the land of Hyrule.

Who wants a game without sound?

 

Before the Internet I considered a playground chum a liar-liar-pants-on-fire because he couldn't back up his statement that Super Burgertime exists.

 

I'll take sifting the Internets for facts over second-guessing rumors and advertising any day.