Games in general are powerful tools for humanity because just like any other version of play in the animal kingdom, there’s value. Kittens learn to hunt by sinking their razor sharp claws and teeth into things. It’s preparation.

Mankind isn’t too different. We try to make education ‘fun’ for the same reason, with very mixed results, but one thing is constant in humanity: Play, and as our technology has become more pervasive, games.

That’s why maybe it should be disturbing that a recent study shows that there is less interest in strategy games.

“…But across its 1.7 million surveys, Quantic Foundry found that two thirds of strategy fans worldwide (except China, where gamers “have a very different gaming motivation profile”) have lost interest in this element of video games. “67% of gamers today care less about strategic thinking and planning when playing games than the average gamer back in June 2015,” the report reads.

When we looked for long-term trends across the 12 motivations, we found that many motivations were stable or experienced minor deviations over the past nine years,” Quantic Foundry said. “Strategy was the clear exception; it had substantially declined over the past nine years and the magnitude of this change was more than twice the size of the next largest change…”

“Gamers Are Becoming Less Interested in Games With Deep Strategy, Study Finds“, Ryan Dinsdale, May 22nd, 2024.

That China has ‘a very different gaming motivation profile’ is interesting. The postulation presented in the article is that social media may be ‘wearing people out’, which is a fairly summarization that could related to the average attention span falling from 150 seconds to 47 seconds.

As Quantic Foundry’s post points out, it’s pretty easy to just blame social media and move on.

…the decline in Strategy is likely not an idiosyncratic phenomenon among digital gamers, but parallels the general reduction in attention spans observed by researchers in different fields.

But because all over-time comparisons are inherently correlational, it’s difficult to pin down cause and effect. While we often blame social media for our decreased attention spans, there’s a lack of concrete causal evidence for this. Of course, it bears pointing out that causal evidence for this would be difficult to produce since it’s unethical to raise children in artificial labs. Also, the shot duration analysis in movies is a counterpoint to blaming social media entirely: this downward trend in media attention span can be traced as far back as the 1930s, although it is certainly possible that social media accelerated the underlying trend.

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. Put simply, we may be too worn out by social media to think deeply about things. For example, higher engagement with social media is correlated with lower math and reading scores and poorer mental health among teenagers. Of course, again, these findings are correlational and not direct causal evidence…

“Gamers Have Become Less Interested in Strategic Thinking and Planning“, Nick Yee, Quantic Foundry, May 21st, 2024.

Before Social Media.

Yet if we dig in through one of the links in Quantic’s article, we find this before social media. We find that shot durations in movies have also been dropping in length.

…Although pacing can refer to motion (Cutting, Brunick, DeLong, Iricinschi, and Candan 2011; Cutting, DeLong,and Brunick 2011) or to the rate of cross-cutting between narrative threads (Bordwell 2013),we will use the term referring to the duration of shots as they have become shorter over time (see also Pearlman 2009). Indeed, the averages shot duration in Hollywood movies has declined from a mean of about 12 seconds in the 1950s to a bit less than 4 seconds in the 2000s (Cutting, Brunick, Delong, Iricinschi, and Candan 2011; Salt 2006)…

Shot Durations, Shot Classes, and the Increased Pace of Popular Movies, James E. Cutting and Ayse Candan, Projections, Volume 9, Issue 2, Winter 2015

Interestingly, this same document has this:

…The second popular account for the shot-duration decline concerns a possible cyclical reciprocity between mass-media screen content and the attention patterns of viewers—sometimes described as a nearly ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) affliction. The idea is that quickened screen
content (television programs, websites, and movies) alters our general attention patterns, perhaps shortening our attention span, and that the makers of this content must incrementally continue to quicken content to keep up with ever-shortening attentional capacity.

Although this idea promotes an incremental change like that seen in Figure 1, we know of no evidence in its support…

Shot Durations, Shot Classes, and the Increased Pace of Popular Movies, James E. Cutting and Ayse Candan, Projections, Volume 9, Issue 2, Winter 2015

Taken by itself, this would lend itself to a net effect of movies becoming shorter. In fact, movies have become longer, which would indicate that there are a lot more shots in a movie and density of content. There’s some more movie length statistics here.

While Attention Spans Might Be A Factor…

It could simply be the cost of doing a good strategy game. In essence, it may not be about the gamers, but about the gaming companies. Creating compelling strategy games is more difficult, and combined with a world that might have people simply wanting some less mentally taxing game to unwind with could be the crux of this. As someone who enjoys a good real time strategy game myself, I am not too interested in the offerings of the last few decades.

A good strategy game, too, generally outlives other genres and therefore doesn’t need to be replaced as soon. This means that it may not be as lucrative for a game company to release strategy games when it could be pumping out first person shooters.

And the other hypothesis Yee described, ‘increasing negativity, polarization, intrusiveness, and emotional manipulation in social media has created a persistent cognitive overload on the finite cognitive resources we have’, could also mean that in the fight for the time of people who would be interested in strategy games, social media might be more attractive.

Movies have gotten longer, attention spans have gotten shorter- but in the end, we only have 24 hours of temporal currency to spend every day, and every move technology makes to ‘make us more productive’ never quite gives us that extra time it promises.

There’s certainly a lot to think about here – if you have the time.