I’m a big grand strategy fan, mostly Paradox games rn, and I almost feel like these are worse for me because the depth keeps me engaged longer (and honesty waste a lot of time) compared even to something like a shitty copy/paste mobile game employing dark patterns because those get so boring so quick. Whereas if I start and eu4 or ck3 campaign and actually play it, it’s almost certain my brain will be shot to hell to for a few days.
Grand strategy and 4x games always feel like too much depth, to me. I know I could do better if I pause and manually place every worker/micro everything. But that's overwhelming. I could try to be clever and only optimize where necessary, but the game is paused, there's no tradeoff for analyzing everything other than my time. Just give me the meaningful choices, game!
But I could go on and on about the very real ways I apply those losses to my work life. I do think they have a huge benefit.
IMO, the biggest problem with modern video games is how many of them are designed to keep you playing virtually forever. I think a game like Zelda (maybe not BoTW, but definitely OoT) is great for children, because it teaches problem solving and rational thinking, and it has a natural time limit! You might play it incessantly for a few days, but eventually you'll reach the end and need to seek out a new experience.
I'm surprised, you seem to have spent enough time around kids (and were a kid once yourself), yet you think "replay value" (which is inflated for some games by not having a definitive end) is at all a modern thing, or even necessarily a bad thing. This extends beyond games. Do you realize how many hours of Frozen have been watched, over, and over, and over? Or how many hours listening to Baby Shark? Or whatever's going around now? Or whatever was going around when you were a kid? (Insert favorite classic Disney movie? Tetris? Cribbage? Chutes and Ladders? Minecraft?) Kids love repetition -- humans in general like repetition a lot. Heard of the Hero's Journey?
Don't underestimate OoT either! If a kid liked OoT enough to reach the end, it's unlikely that they'll just move on immediately unless they're literally forced onto the next shrink-wrapped "brand new" experience by someone. (To be sure, if I'm ever a parent myself, I will consciously do a bit of that pushing to try avoiding letting them repeat the same thing like some popular movie too much, but I'd be a hypocrite and a fool to think I can or should prevent all of it. Besides, it's remarkable how many times you can watch/be all but forced to watch something even as a young teen (cough Napoleon Dynamite) and yet retain almost no memory of the thing's details as an adult.)
OoT is a real-time interactive simulation, such things are naturally just fun to immerse in, even after you've beaten Ganon / "reached the end". But besides just continuing to 'hang out' aimlessly in the game, there's all the stuff they could aim at in order to "100%" the game, or just go back through optional/missed stuff in general/at leisure. (But everyone who plays OoT needs to get the Biggoron's Sword!) So the kid could do that, even talk to friends playing the same game (socializing skills even with a 1p game!) and trade notes or experiences, or compete on times for various races, or they could develop their own random aims, like a quest to smash every pot. Or start a new playthrough but with some difference. Or they might discover the speed running scene and get into that, or just generally see the crazy nonsense people have done to that poor game's code. Again, don't underestimate games like OoT, Super Mario 64, Dark Souls, Megaman X, or Chess, either; having an "end" doesn't protect them from being the object of people's time spending/wasting.
I would absolutely expect a child to play OoT well past beating Ganon for the first time, but there is still a limit to how much you can do. Compare that to something like Destiny, which is basically designed to be a bottomless pit you could grind forever!
> So the kid could do that, even talk to friends playing the same game (socializing skills even with a 1p game!) and trade notes or experiences, or compete on times for various races, or they could develop their own random aims, like a quest to smash every pot. Or start a new playthrough but with some difference. Or they might discover the speed running scene and get into that, or just generally see the crazy nonsense people have done to that poor game's code.
But all of that stuff is great, because now they're creating their own experiences for themselves, getting creative, perhaps even socializing. It's basically the virtual equivalent of traditional unstructured play, which we know has all sorts of educational benefits.
I don't know why children like to e.g. watch Frozen a million times, but I imagine it's because they actually discover something new with each watch. As long as they're driven by intrinsic motivation, I think that's relatively healthy, at least compared to an XP bar that gets higher with each Frozen rewatch!
Definitely not the wider market, but I wouldn’t think it unfair to describe the mobile gaming market like this. There have recently been a number of AAA PC games ported to mobile which makes me actually realize the power of the hardware in my hand, and also wonder why every other mobile game I see is a rip off puzzle game concept that’s been done a million times over.
