[Deicide]

Personally I am of the opinion games have been on the decline recently, though I beleive the RPG market recently got a boost, for unknown reasons, with games like Dragon Quest VIII hitting the market in the kind of rocket blast of sales that seems to scream volumes on the overall quality of releases in that genre all by itself. RTS, my other long lived love, seem to be dragging far into the dirt however with the Age Of Empires series taking over almost completely and very few inovative titles being fed into the fold.

Are they not, and just seem like it, because our own interests in entertainment have grown to be more mature?

This is a distinct possibility. However its been proven time again that games are capable of keeping up with any age group. Games like Devil May Cry manage to appeal to a certain age group and even produce the level of difficulty expected by older, more mature and more experianced gamers. So my question is not 'are the gamers growing older' but more 'why is the industry not provideing for those it knows will buy its products if they did as such?'.
Older gamers are a reliable, tried and true market, why NOT take the effort to appeal to us? I'll answer that below..

Or is it that society has grown so immature in the last decade that they have to "dumb down" games -- i.e. make them more visually appealing, but less intellectually stimulating -- to have the largest market?

I wouldnt have put it that way myself, what we have here is not so much people who are too 'dumb' to play decent games as people that either grew up with the less challengeing and original games of recent times or are new to the whole thing, either way they lack the kind of experiance more 'established' gamers tend to expect of there fellows includeing the understanding of what really constitutes a challenge, the attention span and the knowledge to stear clear of the horrible movie, TV and other knock offs the rest of us are well versed in avoiding at this point.
Visual appeal is there to get more people interested, to many none gamers the whole 'o it looks pretty' is a big draw into the gameing world. Often they arent really interested in gameing for its own sake, in the same way a lot of people listen to music to pass the time or while doing something else as apposed to just sitting and listening for prolonged periods of time, they want something pretty and amuseing that wont eat up there social life, not something innovative or even something that tells a windeing tale of human nature and heroics.
There is also the matter of kid gamers, who we should really look at as parents since they are who decide on the game purchased. Again they want bright colors, positive images and something that wont keep junior from his homework and his friends all night long. Granted most of them are still somehow managed to fail at this, and the effect of there ignorance on the market is a continued agrivation for the rest of us, but the point remains that, for the most part, this is what daddy, and daddys deep pockets, want to see on the shelves.

It seems to me what we have here is less a manditory media 'dumbing down' and more a shift to a different market, one thats slightly easier and very much cheaper to cater to, one that demands less inovation, less game life and dont mind higher prices. In short the much dreaded 'casual gamers'.

However I dont belive its so much that more bad games are coming out in terms of percentage. We still have a large number of good games like the afore cited DQVIII and DMC as well as the small growth of casual games that many older gamers are begining to enjoy like the Katamari series, it so happens there is a lot of horrible stuff out there but, when you think about it there always was. With the new money coming into the industry theres more chance of better games as well as a chance this horrible vulture-fest will go on for some time to come.

Its really just a case of asking if the occasional diamond is worth putting up with all the dirt that surrounds it.

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