[Etadanik]

Perhaps ADD was the wrong term to use, but really, when have people here ever used the term ADD to mean the specific psychological condition with respect to MMOs? It's always been a rather elitist way of denoting the short attention span people have and thus why games like WoW are successful - because within the frenzy of button mashing and monsters dying lies one of the secrets to Blizzard's success, no? Or at least so it seems.

So, a definition of attention span with respect to games could go something like this: attention span is defined as the time it takes for you to become bored before having to be stimulated by a new sort of experience. It includes any form of waiting within a game - for example, sailing on a ship in EQ. Flying on a griffon in WoW. Waiting for a raid to start. Waiting for a monster to die after executing all the needed attacks. Waiting for LFG. Waiting for a monster to spawn (camping). It can also include generally repetitive tasks such as grinding and farming, since people with "ADD" are thought to abhor doing the same thing over a long period of time. This is pretty much the definition (armchair) designers use when they talk about why quests in WoW are supportive of shorter attention spans in "breaking up" the monotony, or why having combat last 30 seconds instead of 3 minutes is more conducive to attracting the kiddies.

With that behind us, I'm generally referring to and responding to the commonly held idea, these days, that games are more fast-paced and action-packed because companies are targetting a younger audience, which naturally implies that kids have shorter attention spans. But I'm wondering whether that's really true - after all, it's not like adults were the primary consumers of games back in the day. Personal experience informs me that I used to sit in front of a computer/SNES playing games like the FF series (which, if you recall, was the epitome of slow) for hours at a time, and that people I knew who gamed did the same. Could you do the same these days? Could you put 200+ hours into a turn-based RPG ever again?

I'm also referring to the tendency for people to look back to their younger years and, with nostalgia, praise such slow games that nowadays would be considered tedious. This trend implies that gamers were, indeed, much more tolerant of the sort of "bullshit" that spawned 200+ hour games that people gladly enjoyed despite the fact that, if the same game came out nowadays, it'd be heavily criticized for being drawn-out.

What has changed between then and now? Well, for one thing: gamers have aged. Yes, there's a younger generation of gamers, but what makes them different from the current generation of adult gamers back when they were young? If you were capable of putting up with slow games then, they're capable of putting up with slow games now. It's *you* who can no longer put up with slow games, because you've grown past them - either in age, or in experience (gaming and otherwise). Or in both.

There are certainly other factors: for one, the player base has grown. Perhaps as a result of games becoming more "casual" in the sense of requiring less attention spans, more people with less attention spans have entered the market. But if so, I'd say that these tend to be older people than younger, since the net effect of a enlarging market is that the average age of gamers have gone *UP*, not down. There' aslo the argument that games are faster and more action-packed now because developers have learned that being faster and more action-packed makes a better game - that this is, in fact, the gaming industry's come of age. However, that too maybe challenged. Who remembers playing games like Contra and Raiden back in the day? Or Street Fighter & Doom? It was not so much that we lacked fast games back in the day, more that we also played slow games. Nowadays, slow games are generally criticized for taking too much time/being slow/etc, and that is evidenced by the "death" of the turn-based game in many genres, by which I mean publishers are no longer willing to fund them.

But what it comes down to is this simple fact: for the most part, adult gamers do not have the same time to waste on games that kids did. We have responsibilities and commitments, and while some might've had the same as a kid, I daresay that most of us did not. I used to be able to put 8+ hours into EQ without as much as a blink. Even thinking about doing that in WoW or EQ 2 now gives me the shivers because I simply cannot imagine wasting 8+ hours playing a game - there's too many other things that I could be doing. So nowadays I'm content to play an hour or two, max, in one sitting. It would not be a stretch to say that, because of my shorter gameplay time, I also developed a shorter attention span. After all, if all you've got is 1-2 hours a day, you likely won't be satisfied spending those 1-2 hours waiting for a group, traveling across the world on a boat, or fighting ten mobs because it takes you ten minutes to take one down.

Your tolerance for games that take a long-ass time to complete would've also been affected, since you probably won't want to spend the next two years finishing just one game. No, you'd want instant gratification, because you want to be entertained in the short amount of time that you have, and because you want to get the same feeling of having finished a game that you did all the time as a kid. You'd become the proverbial "ADD" gamer, even without noticing it - to the point where it becomes a common misconception that it's kiddie gamers, and not the growing number of adult gamers, who are driving the industry's move towards shorter, faster games. You might not think yourself as having a shorter attention span, but let's be honest here:

Could you still muster the same effort you had back when you grinded through the travesty that were the hell levels, EQ 50-60, the hundreds of AA's, or the raids of Vex Thal that took seven hours of monotous grinding? Could you still muster the ability to sit fifteen minutes while waiting for your mana to regenerate? If not, then congratulations - you have a shorter attention span. And I think we all do, as we get older.

And yes, I recognize the irony of making a post this long while arguing about adults having shorter attention spans. But I'm hoping, in this case, that there are enough new points raised that it won't be a monotonous read - it certainly wasn't a monotonous write, as I've been forced to look at many of my own biases with regards to attention spans. Alas if it is otherwise.