When I first got access to a PC as a kid, it was a couple of years before the first true MMORPG launched, and I had no idea I was even going to become an RPG gamer. In fact, I was mostly a sci-fi exploration and strategy gamer, obsessed with games like Master of Orion and Nomad, the latter of which absolutely nobody remembers and I think my mom got it out of a bargain bin somewhere. When you’re a kid, you take what you can get, right?
But that was a very long time ago, and I get a lot of my strategy play (and spreadsheet crunching, ahem) out of MMORPGs, so I don’t play nearly as many pure strategy titles as I once did – and apparently I’m not alone. According to Quantic Foundry – i.e., the analytics and research firm responsible for the Gamer Motivation Profile and its associated findings – strategy gaming is on the decline with the types of folks who take these surveys.
“When we looked for long-term trends across the 12 motivations [as defined in the Gamer Motivation survey], we found that many motivations were stable or experienced minor deviations over the past 9 years,” founder Dr Nick Yee says. “Strategy was the clear exception; it had substantially declined over the past 9 years and the magnitude of this change was more than twice the size of the next largest change. […] Or put more plainly, 67% of gamers today care less about strategic thinking and planning when playing games than the average gamer back in June 2015.”
The change doesn’t seem to have anything to do with gender (it shows equally in men and women) or country, and it predates COVID, though the scientists suggest COVID “exacerbated or prolonged an ongoing trend.” While there’s no confirmable reason for the slide, Quantic touches on media consumption studies on movies and videos, suggesting the strategy gaming decline could be part of a broader “general reduction in attention spans” on a societal level (that began nearly 100 years ago).
“Another potential hypothesis is that the increasing negativity, polarization, intrusiveness, and emotional manipulation in social media has created a persistent cognitive overload on the finite cognitive resources we have,” the researchers hypothesize. “Put simply, we may be too worn out by social media to think deeply about things.”
We’ve taken the Gamer Motivation survey as a team with our readers several times – once in 2016 and again in 2021 to see how we’d changed (and whether our specific MMORPG-player complaints had been addressed).
