The relativity of inconvenience
Entry posted by Clephas
1293 views
One of the things I've experienced more and more in the last decade as a part of 'the generation gap' is a difference between our interpretations of the word 'inconvenience', especially when it comes to games and devices.
Understand, when I say 'inconvenience', it generally means 'it doesn't have the functions I find useful'. When I talk to people who were born after the year 2000, it is almost always 'too many functions I don't know how to use/are not intuitive to me'.
Perhaps the most blatant clash of the generations, at least for PC gamers like me who play games from multiple locales, is the difference between versions of Windows. A lot of the young people I encounter are perfectly willing to deal with annoying adverts and intrusive programs in exchange for the convenience of Windows 8 and 10 (and I will admit that, from the perspective of someone who likes to keep their brain as unwrinkled as possible, they can be considered more convenient *smiles dryly*). In my case, those adverts and intrusive programs eat at my RAM, my bandwidth, and record my daily activities to be sent to people I don't know. I my mind, that far outweighs any 'convenience' gained from the simplification of the system. In fact, it is that very simplification of the system (which incidentally makes it more inconvenient to purchase and play games from anyone other than Microsoft) that makes it inconvenient for people like me. Sure, we can download software that modifies certain aspects of the interface to get around these difficulties... but it becomes harder year after year.
I was extremely shocked a few years back when I played Kami no Rhapsody from Eushully and saw a game that had obviously been designed by some moron who didn't understand why touch-screen functions were nothing more than an annoyance for someone without a touchscreen. The 'simplification' of the battle system made the game flat-out boring in comparison to other games I'd played by the company, and the highly-restrictive character progression that gave an illusion of freedom (I'm not exaggerating) only made things worse... because the programmer was obviously someone used to working on games with microtransactions.
That isn't to say the game was horrible, but it was horrifying, in that I saw the worst aspects of mobile apps intruding on a PC experience. I don't and will never like touchscreens. They get dirty too easily, break too easily, and cost more than your standard monitor. To be frank, it is far easier to use a mouse on a PC than a touch-screen and less likely to cost you a few hundred dollars every other year.
So what is the meaning of convenience to me? I am, to be frank, shockingly old-fashioned in the eyes of many because I don't even own a cell phone. I used to have one, a hand-me-down from a relative, but I disposed of it almost immediately because people were calling me and using money (unlimited texting being a bad word to cell phone companies at the time) to text me on things that could be done more efficiently by email. I also hated it being possible for people reach me when I wanted to be alone, lol.
So what about a smart-phone? I honestly have trouble developing an interest in smart-phone gaming, because microtransactions offend my sense of wanting to have things 'paid for and done with'. I hate subscriptions, I hate monthly payments, and I especially hate having my personal information available to a company that sells info to others (as most cell phone companies do or want to do). I can't maintain an interest in anything that makes me pay more than once to enjoy the experience. If I spend $120 on a game and its season pass, I don't want to find out that there are microtransactions in game that nickel and dime me. I also hate that I have to distrust any game application that cost me less than forty dollars because I can't be sure half the game won't be unplayable without further piecemeal investment of money.
I also hate the dead-eyed look some of the younger gamers give me when they laugh about having spent their entire paycheck on virtual items in an app they'll forget about a month later.
In other words, my idea of convenience has nothing to do with what others seem to consider convenience now. My idea of convenience is playing video games on my retinas with signals from my nervous system, not playing drastically simplified games with flicks of my finger.
Sorry, I rave... but I get tired of all the BS about 'convenient features' that companies use to cover up the building layers of inconvenience in the shit they try to sell me. Convenience has become such a meaningless term in recent years that it makes me want to scream.
4 Comments
Recommended Comments