4 ms·

A Storm of Stories

11 points by thenomad 11y ago

jsnell 11y ago
It's probably true that there's an excess of easily accessible quality entertainment. I certainly have backlogs in multiple content categories. But those backlogs just build up, because I'm much more likely to play/read/watch a new release than something a couple of years old. The reason is that a big part of the value of the content is social. It's a lot more interesting to play a game while a high concentration of other people are playing it too. It's a lot less fun to play it years later, and just read through dusty archives (since the chances of an IRL friend playing through the game at the same time are miniscule).
- thenomad 11y ago
  Ah, that's a very interesting point - and I'd agree with it from personal experience, to a certain extent. My own consumption of media seems to be split between new and old at the moment. I've bought an unusually large number of new games this year, but that number is still, I think, 2. Of course games have a further problem I didn't have time to get into in this article: the better the game, the longer time most people will spend on it compared to other games. That means that as game quality goes up, the number of games consumed a year will tend to go down. And if an absolute phenomenon like WoW or Minecraft arrives, it nukes the industry for everyone else for a year...
Mithaldu 11y ago
Very fascinating read and completely in line with my experience as a gamer. For a while it was ok to look at the "what's new" list on steam every week or so and see if there was something interesting. Nowadays there's 10+ new games per day and it's become impossible to figure out if there's actually anything good in there without considerable time investment. Interestingly the thing that will inevitably need to happen to solve this problem is something Steam is already doing: Improve the tools to filter out things one doesn't care about. Steam allows hiding games, games have tags, and there's a suggestion queue that feeds partly off the user's preferences and partly off of what's new and popular. This means occasionally one can go through that queue, see a list of new or obscure things one might be interested in, and use the tags to quickly decide whether a game has elements one wants or does not want; and then mark it for later, or hide it. Whenever i interact with other shops (PSN, GOG, Google Play Store, iTunes, etc.) it is a massive pain point that these do not allow filtering things that i do not care for. Music and TV stores are even worse in that department, and i've seen my parents look at stuff like Amazon Fire Instant Video, which on paper is an amazing offering, and discard it offhand because the first 20 things it offered were stuff they had no interest in, and there was no way to make them go away. Fascinatingly, i've already seen the software where this evolution will lead to. It exists in the form of taggable image board like https://github.com/r888888888/danbooru https://github.com/r888888888/danbooru They accept tags from the users and are very liberal in allowing users what tags to apply, with some moderation. On bigger boards the content tends to have astounding amounts of tags in surprising detail. At the same time users can use tags to create lists of things they might like, or directly hide things they might dislike. Steam is moving in that direction, and as the amount of content, both existing and newly-created, becomes evermore massive it seems inevitable that software will end up in that domain.

11 points by thenomad 11y ago

It's probably true that there's an excess of easily accessible quality entertainment. I certainly have backlogs in multiple content categories. But those backlogs just build up, because I'm much more likely to play/read/watch a new release than something a couple of years old. The reason is that a big part of the value of the content is social. It's a lot more interesting to play a game while a high concentration of other people are playing it too. It's a lot less fun to play it years later, and just read through dusty archives (since the chances of an IRL friend playing through the game at the same time are miniscule).

thenomad 11y ago
Ah, that's a very interesting point - and I'd agree with it from personal experience, to a certain extent. My own consumption of media seems to be split between new and old at the moment. I've bought an unusually large number of new games this year, but that number is still, I think, 2. Of course games have a further problem I didn't have time to get into in this article: the better the game, the longer time most people will spend on it compared to other games. That means that as game quality goes up, the number of games consumed a year will tend to go down. And if an absolute phenomenon like WoW or Minecraft arrives, it nukes the industry for everyone else for a year...

Mithaldu 11y ago

Very fascinating read and completely in line with my experience as a gamer. For a while it was ok to look at the "what's new" list on steam every week or so and see if there was something interesting. Nowadays there's 10+ new games per day and it's become impossible to figure out if there's actually anything good in there without considerable time investment. Interestingly the thing that will inevitably need to happen to solve this problem is something Steam is already doing: Improve the tools to filter out things one doesn't care about. Steam allows hiding games, games have tags, and there's a suggestion queue that feeds partly off the user's preferences and partly off of what's new and popular. This means occasionally one can go through that queue, see a list of new or obscure things one might be interested in, and use the tags to quickly decide whether a game has elements one wants or does not want; and then mark it for later, or hide it. Whenever i interact with other shops (PSN, GOG, Google Play Store, iTunes, etc.) it is a massive pain point that these do not allow filtering things that i do not care for. Music and TV stores are even worse in that department, and i've seen my parents look at stuff like Amazon Fire Instant Video, which on paper is an amazing offering, and discard it offhand because the first 20 things it offered were stuff they had no interest in, and there was no way to make them go away. Fascinatingly, i've already seen the software where this evolution will lead to. It exists in the form of taggable image board like https://github.com/r888888888/danbooru https://github.com/r888888888/danbooru They accept tags from the users and are very liberal in allowing users what tags to apply, with some moderation. On bigger boards the content tends to have astounding amounts of tags in surprising detail. At the same time users can use tags to create lists of things they might like, or directly hide things they might dislike. Steam is moving in that direction, and as the amount of content, both existing and newly-created, becomes evermore massive it seems inevitable that software will end up in that domain.