As Gamers Get Older, There's a New Need for an Easy Button

[Kugyince]

"Splinter Cell Conviction," the new stealth action title from Ubisoft, will be a hit. It's currently boasting a Metacritic score of 86 and, once the NPD Group's monthly video game sales charts hit in a few weeks, "Conviction"'s numbers should make it one of April's top-selling games.

Most critics agree that it's a good (verging on great) game. But the reason SCC will be greeted warmly on hundreds of thousands of consoles isn't only due to the game's new mechanics like Mark & Execute and Last Known Position. Sam Fisher, the black ops agent who's been the star of the Tom Clancy-created stealth series, is getting reinvented as he's getting older.

That balancing act is something the players buying Fisher's game are having to figure out, too. The average age of the first-wave hardcore gamer -- the ones who've made successive generations of video game hardware and software in a multi-billion dollar business -- falls somewhere in the early to mid-30s now. And their lives are changing. What "Splinter Cell" does in an uncanny subtextual fashion is mirror those changes in both plot and game design.

In the game's opening levels, Sam's motivation is to track down the men responsible for his daughter's death, a narrative that resonates because lots of the hardcore players are hitting the age when they're starting to plan families, if they don't already have kids. The loss of a child gets used as a story beat often in adventure fiction, but a big chunk of the game's audience is reaching the point in their own lives where that may hit home a little harder.

As Gamers Get Older, There's a New Need for an Easy Button - Games - News - IFC.com

[Winnebagel]

That was too politically charged for my tastes. I also don't think that getting older means things have to get easier. I have a feeling that the writer on this one probably always wanted things easy, and is just using this as an excuse.

One thing I will say is this, as people's lives get busier, I think the need for the option to save a game any time becomes more important. I don't know why these developers still use check points (with massive amounts of time between them) in most games. Most PC games have been employing any time saves in games since the 80's. It just seems very archaic to me for consoles to keep this going.

Getting back to Splinter Cell, I like the new game, but I think some of the art decisions were a little stupid. Particularly, I don't like how they feel the need to paste all your objectives on the walls. It's stylistic but silly. Maybe they put them on the walls because the old dumb gamers wouldn't know what to do and find it too hard otherwise.