Thank you. I was wondering the same thing. The conclusion that attention must be on porn/gambling/crypto is such a wild jump.

correlation != causation

Yes, trading is addictive

*gambling

"Gambling and crypto" reminds me of when I was in DARE and they would refer to "drugs, alcohol, and tobacco," and I thought "aren't those all drugs?"

Gambling with make believe money and lots of economy and trading "experts" telling you where to "invest" in

I'm old enough to remember when games were being demonized. Don't sound too bad now, eh?

Kind of... it can be far more structured and methodical than typical gambling

I am dedicating a week off just to play Slay the Spire 2 early access.

I don’t know whether to upvote this or not. On one hand, I know plenty of great and amazing games. On the other hand, plenty of slop is being created or forced into existing games.

I mean, at that point a lot of games are also gambling.

People follow "rules/systems" and notice "patterns" when pulling slots too.

Me too. Pretty funny 😂

Because the article is badly written.

It's confusing money spend on X must equal time spent on X.

The total amount of money spend on video games has gone done but more money is now being spent on things like crypto currency. This is being claimed that it means that people are spending more time on crypto since they are spending more money there. It ignores other issues such as who is spending on what (its countries as a whole, not amlunt on average per user), gaming is more expensive, more games are being made as a live service and are flopping (Highguard anyone?), retro gaming is getting bigger (doesn't cost a fortune), etc...

To be honest I think Final Fantasy might be a bad example. FF16 feeling so weird and being so divisive isn’t because it’s AAA slop, it’s because they always experiment with something in each entry.

This time, they experimented with doing a dark, gritty and punishing word that had basically no levity in it. Even your home base had nothing but NPCs either being quietly depressed or LOUDLY depressed, emphasis on the loud. There was nowhere to go where you could take an emotional break from the impending end of the world. Every chapter of the story up until the very final cutscene did nothing but make the world more depressing.

Rebirth proves that they can create a world that feels massive but not empty, that they can create a gritty story without being emotionally oppressive, and that they can create a game that feels like the classics but in the modern age.

I don’t believe the source material is the only reason they made Rebirth as good as it is. Yes, they knew they couldn’t fuck this one up or else it was the end as a relevant company, but if they had truly lost their soul, they wouldn’t have been able to rise to meet that challenge.

In other words; I won’t write off new FF games unless FF16 becomes the template rather than an experiment I personally choose not to replay.

Totally. Been a gamer for 30+ years, and none of the new stuff holds my interest. Also, my hardware being less than a full time mortgage, means most new games run poorly. So, old stuff it is.

This is simply not true

I am aware attention is the currency of the internet but games do exist outside of it. Unlike crypto. Their target group may overlap to some degree but games and unregulated gambling are still different things. Even when gambling is involved in games those markets are separated from the actual game like in CS2. That’s the extreme case and you can still play that game as normal without ever opening a crate. Games do not compete with crypto unless developers desperately try to.

Games were just supposed to be games, they were never meant to compete with those things. But thise CEO's want it all.

I'm losing my attention for everything. The color in the world is fading and there's little joy left in vice.

*shitty overmonetized slopgames, also known as AAA games are losing the "attention war". The indie and AA scene is blooming.

No no no there's lots of good happening you just to look out and see it. Yes a lot of the bad news sucks but there is a lot of good still happening and a lot of people getting things done:

Read https://goodgoodgood.co/, and https://goodnewsnetwork.org/. Also watch Good News (That's the name) and Sam Bentley YouTube channels

For good good good.co there is also 2 articles where they cover studies on Hope (They cover many other studies, hopeful and good news too in their other articles):

1. New study finds hope key to a meaningful life

https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/hope-key-in-meaningful-life

1. Hopeful people live better lives

https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/hopeful-people-live-better-lives-study

There is a 3rd site that covers issues but in problem solving way forgot name of it though.

Never give up!! We the people have the power to make this life wonderful and free! -From Chaplin final speech video. Great video to watch

You can do anything in this life. Keep going. Connect with others and do! Find things you enjoy doing and find fulfillment from in life! Much love to you brother/sister!

The stock market wants it all. Infinite is no good. This is why Valve is best in that regard. Private company that moves as one without external influences

The way to make your return on the initial budget is to shrink the initial budget. You can't scale these things forever.

Older games are also meant to be beaten. I remember games that had reviews saying, "This game will take 40-60 hours to complete", and that was it. You could replay it if you wanted, but it was just an experience.

The new idea is live service games. Games you can never really beat, you just grind at it forever. That or they have a bunch of add on things to make the game take a lot longer so you keep playing the same thing over and over again. I'm not saying they're not fun, just that they lack a satisfying conclusion and variety.

That all grey episode of fairly odd parents.

I do notice that it takes more effort though. Before online platforms figured out the whole engagement outrage pattern, I spent a lot of time playing video games, yes, but also reading books or making art.

Then the online platforms started investing in trying to figure out how to engage you, and it is easier and easier to spend time online by default to the exclusion of other things and feel bad about it because your online time wasn't spent on something that made you feel good like it did in the past. It is surprisingly hard to resist the current big platforms are trying to push us down.

People on the Threadiverse have taken at least a small step by disengaging from Reddit and going to an open-source, non-corporate-controlled engagement-maxing platform. But human negativity bias still makes it a lot easier to post outrage and comment outrage and get in fights. Hell, I am making this comment because of my own negativity bias and desire to expound on how much I hate what has been done to our attention spans! It's a lot easier to complain than to analyze why I enjoy something. And I think the engagement bait outrage has ruined my brain a bit to still sort of seek that out and scroll (but better Lemmy than Reddit). I've been trying to get off but change is hard. Sometimes I relapse and click an article I know will have negativity and anger, like this article I clicked on.

I do really appreciate what you did by posting something to help instead of yet another "thing bad" even if I super agree with "thing bad", and I'm being part of the "thing bad" pattern right now.

I do know of !takeyourtimeback@lemmy.world which might be able to help with the whole online engagement problem.