marketing

Decreased Interest in Strategy Games: Why?

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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.

Persuasion, Manipulation, Oh My.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 3 Comments

I spent a lot of time writing ‘From Inputs To The Big Picture: An AI Roundup‘ largely because it’s a very big topic, but also because I spent a lot of time considering the persuasive aspect of AI.

GPT-4 is presently considered 82% more persuasive than humans and can now read emotions.

That, friendly reader, scares me, because we do not live in a perfect world where everyone has good intentions.

The key differences between manipulation and persuasion are about intention. An AI by itself has no intention, at least for now, but those that create it do have an intention. They could consciously manipulate an artificial intelligence through training data and algorithms, effectively becoming puppet-masters of a persuasive AI. Do they mean well?

Sure. Everyone means well. But what does ‘well’ mean for them? No villain ever really thinks they have bad intentions, despite what movies and television might have people think. Villains come dressed in good intentions. Good villains are… persuasive, and only those not persuaded might see a manipulation for what it is, even when the villain themself does not.

After all, Darth Vader didn’t go to the dark side for cookies, right?

There’s so much to consider with this. The imagination runs wild. It should. How much of the persuasion regarding AI is manipulation, as an example?

I think we’re in for a bit of trouble, and it’s already begun.

Our Own Little Worlds

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If I tell you that all apples sound the same, these days you might think I was talking about an overpriced consumer electronics device.

Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. If I were referring to the brand, if you’re a consumer of that brand you might feel attacked and want to defend your choices because I used the word ‘overpriced’. If you’re not a consumer of that brand you might smile quietly at the description.

If I instead said “All red apples sound the same”, you might lean toward fruit because the Apple brand is not particularly red. In fact, they market as silver.1

It’s a pretty silly statement otherwise, we might think. Different colors of apples do not have different sounds that we hear. Yet it’s also a very true statement for the same reason.

Color is something we agreed upon despite how many types of color receptors you have in your eyes. 2 We may not experience the color the same in our minds, yet we all agree that things that reflect certain parts of light are indeed ‘red’.

In fact I can say that apples aren’t red. We all agree that they look red to us, but what they look like isn’t what they are. They happen to look like that because we happen to have organs that interpret vibrations of light waves into our little reality in our heads that allows us to bounce our shins just enough to remember how painful it is to bounce your shins.

But sound? Vibration and frequency, except sound requires a medium to go through and light does not.

We are all just building our own little worlds. Language allows us to share our worlds.

  1. As silver as an Apple. Knowing Apple, there’s a specific shade of silver and they have a name for it. ↩︎
  2. There’s an online ‘test’ that has been popular recently where everyone thinks they’re a tetrochromate, but that test is questionable. ↩︎

Tamed Mushrooms.

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I paused in the kitchen, needing something that could be mistaken for food by my digestive system. Looking in the cupboard, I remembered picking this up.

You see, a lot of people don’t know this, but the mushrooms aren’t actually wild. In fact, I almost passed them by because I know that any mushroom you can grind down into enough mushroom powder to stick into boxes isn’t really wild.

I like mushrooms. I don’t know as much about them as some people, but I know I like mushrooms. I know that there are mushrooms that are psychedelic, and I’m pretty sure that these mushrooms aren’t psychedelic.

They are processed mushrooms mixed into a fairly tasty concoction if you add boiling water to it. It might even emulate the flavor of an actual wild mushroom soup brewed by a druid deep in a forest somewhere, but I’m pretty sure that the druid isn’t boxing powder. Of course, that could explain why we have less druids than movies seem to think we have.

Wild. What is the appeal of ‘wild’? Why is ‘wild’ more appealing than ‘processed tame mushroom powder with seasoning’?

I do not know. I do know that if it comes in a box, it ain’t that wild.

Sleeping, Pillows, And Packaging

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By Dominic Alberts (Pixabay)

Nobody told me how to sleep. Sleep was just something I did, generally when exhausted. The mantra of, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” was the anthem of my youth.

Sleep, as it happens, is pretty important. People say that, but they don’t always communicate why sleep is important. Getting older has forced me to come to terms with these things – things which I wouldn’t have paid attention to while I was younger and worked hours that were not as structured as the companies I worked for were.

They tell you you should sleep, but not at the price of their productivity.

Lately, I’ve been taking sleep more seriously, but as a side sleeper I am very particular about pillows. Most pillows I encounter don’t support my head properly, much less comfortably. At one point I had a pillow made at a custom pillow store somewhere in the U.S., and when I moved down I brought it with me. I spent $100 on that pillow, and when I returned to the U.S. I let an aunt have it because she was a particularly nice aunt. She loved it. She died, and the pillow disappeared.

Lately, I’ve been trying to sleep better – not necessarily more – and so I have had this pillow dilemma.

I was at a local store just some days ago and they were having a sale on some Sealy pillows which I couldn’t find on Amazon to link. I’ve spent decades buying crappy pillows in the hope that they would be good, and they are generally not even passable unless folded in half. They were having some special on Sealy memory foam cooling pillows…

But they were in boxes. I couldn’t poke them or press down on them. I’m not buying a pillow based on promises, and Sealy apparently thought that their name on the box would be sufficient to get people to buy a pillow.

No.

So I told the guy who was handling the sale that if he wanted to sell me a pillow, one of them had to come out of the box. Another man, about my age, backed me up. Before you knew it, we had a revolution on our hands to unbox the pillow, the salesperson relented – and as it happened, he sold me a pillow.

We had to free the pillow from the box, which should seem ridiculous because it is ridiculous. There are some things you simply don’t buy online unless you know what you’re ordering and they are much the same as buying something off the shelf that requires the same knowledge.

You’d think marketing and sales folks would understand this. They generally don’t. Clothing, beds, pillows… it’s so much better to buy in person so that you know what you’re getting.

I like the pillow. I’ll write more about my adventures with sleep in the near future.

Amusingly, there’s an Amazon affiliate link in here to Sealy pillows for the people who don’t understand this. 🙂

Who Are We? Where Are We Headed?

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We used to simply dangle from the DNA of our ancestors, then we ended up in groups, civilizations, and now that we have thoroughly infested the planet we keep running into each other and the results are so unpleasant that at least some people are renting a virtual, artificial girlfriend for $1/minute.

It’s hard not to get a little existential about the human race with all that’s going on these days with technology, the global economy, wars, and where people are focusing their attention. They’re not really separate things. They’re all connected in some weird way, just like most of humanity.

They are connected in logical ways, we like to think, but when you get large groups of people logic has an odd tendency to make way for rationalization. There are pulls and tugs on the rug under the group dynamics, eventually shaking some people free of it for better or worse.

This whole ‘artificial intelligence’ thing has certainly escalated technology. The present red dots in this regard are about just how much the world will be improved by it. We’ve heard that before, and you would think that with technology now reflecting more clearly our own societies through large language models that we might be more aware that we’ve all heard these promises before.


I can promise you that for the foreseeable future, despite technological advances, babies will continue being born naked. They will come into the world distinctly unhappy with having to leave a warm and fluid space to a colder, less fluid space. From there, they seem to be having less and less time before some form of glowing flat screen is made available to them, replete with things marketed toward them.

It would be foolish to think that the people marketing stuff on those flat screens are all altruistic and mean the best of the children as individuals and humanity. They’re trying to make money. Everyone’s trying to make money.

I don’t know that this is empirically true or not, but it seems to me that when I was a child, people were more interesting in creating value than making money. If they created value, they got paid so that they could continue creating value. It seems, at least to me, that we’ve been pretty good about removing value from the equation of life.

This is not to say I’m right. Maybe values have changed. Maybe I’m an increasingly dusty antique that every now and then shouts, “Get off my lawn!”. I don’t think I’m wrong, though, because I do encounter people of younger generations who are more interested in value than money, but when society makes money more important than value, then everything becomes about money and we lose… value.

To compensate, marketing tells people what they should be valuing to be the person that they are marketed to become.

I don’t know where this is going, but I think we need to switch drivers.

Maybe we should figure out who we are and where we want to go. Without advertising.

It’s Not About Success.

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_Gustave Le Bon Error

I was reading GS’s “Not Successful Enough?”, and I wanted to take this in a different direction because I don’t think it’s about success.

Success means different things to different people, but most of the time when people refer to being successful they mean financial success, or career ‘success’, whatever that might be.

What do you consider successful beyond those red dots? We’re told that’s success, we’re indoctrinated to believe it’s success because we send off the little kids to go to school so that they can get jobs so that they can be… successful.

In some part, our parents and family determine what we believe what success is, but it’s institutionalized in our schools and even in advertising what success is.

They also say you need to have children, which makes sense in a way since that’s how you pass on all that genetic soup made up of male and female zygotes so that they too can be… successful. Most of the zygotes, by the way – the vast majority – are not considered successful, not because they don’t have jobs and fancy titles, but because their job is really to be numerous in the hope one of them is successful. That’s really the larger game being played with jobs and titles by homo sapiens.

I used to think that money mattered, and it does to some degree but not as much as people who want you to buy their crap want you to think. I never really thought titles mattered because I have so many people who are in some sort of authority that are idiots and consistently screw things up that I’m not impressed by titles, or diplomas, or academic degrees.

If there is any success for a human in this world, it’s based on a value. Different cultures have different values, different families instill (or not) different values, and different people have different values. The question about success is really a question of, say it out loud, values.

If you don’t feel your successful enough, take some time and consider what you believe your values to be. Look back on the things you felt successful about, or what you believe you failed at. You can’t miss the feeling of success or failure, they stand out. Maybe write a list. Maybe do a spreadsheet. Just do it. Examine each success and each failure. Examine the values associated with them. Examine the circumstances around them.

And work on the values, maybe. Maybe what you presently believe is success is not really what you feel is successful. Maybe you’re just making yourself unhappy for no good reason, stressing out over the need to buy meaningless crap to impress meaningless people with the net result of having a meaningless life.

There are two people who drive nice BMWs in my neighborhood, and I’m friends with them despite having a Hyundai. They constantly complain about parts, service, etc. They’re successful, right? Are they? They’re unhappy with their cars, so that doesn’t seem much like success to me, but people see them in these cars and believe they are successful because… why?

I believe that while we’re all in this artificial rat race of life that gives some advantages over others – and regardless of how it is done, some people will always have some advantages – if you can find meaning and value in what you do, you are more of a success than advertising campaigns would have you believe. You may well be a success in many ways and are simply wanting to appear successful.

The people who matter in life see your value beyond what they can use you for and what they can get from you. If you’re being told you’re not a success, question the intentions of the people making you believe it.

Meanwhile, be nice to the people who deserve it and even some that don’t.

Incoming: The Tide of Marketing.

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_google_ai_marketing

Browsing Facebook, I come across this in my feed and it’s as if they read what I wrote in Silent Bias:

…With social media companies, we have seen the effect of the social media echo chambers as groups become more and more isolated despite being more and more connected, aggregating to make it easier to sell advertising to. This is not to demonize them, many bloggers were doing it before them, and before bloggers there was the media, and before then as well. It might be amusing if we found out that cave paintings were actually advertising for someone’s spears or some hunting consulting service, or it might be depressing…

Almost on command, this shows up in the main feed on Facebook – sponsored content by Google. I haven’t used Bard, but I fear I have suffered Bard’s work because… I imagine that they used Bard to generate that advertising campaign for Bard.

The first thing that every sustainable technology has to do is pay for itself. The magnitude of this, though, is well beyond cave drawings. As it is, marketing has used a lot of psychology to get people to chase red dots.  Now that this has become that much ‘easier’ for humans, and now that it’s being marketed as a marketing tool…

How much crap do you not need? We need to be prepared for the coming tide of marketing bullshit.

The Red Dots of Life.

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_red dot

There’s a life skill to have that I think these days is more important than most. Probably the easiest way to explain it is by the ubiquitous cat and laser pointer that, by now, people in the Amazon jungle likely know about by carrier parrot.

Those of us that have had a cat of any generation have played with cats in one form of the other, but when the Theodore Maiman created the first laser in 1960 at Hughes Research Laboratory I’m fairly certain that he didn’t think that it would become something carried in pet stores. For those of you who don’t know, in the early days of the laser pointer, it was marketed for humans to use on humans for much the same reason.

In the days of boards and projectors, it was marketed as a tool to focus people on things. It worked really well until Microsoft decided to put out PowerPoint and making every meeting involving it a snooze fest. There was that window where the laser pointer had it’s day, only to be promoted to cat tormentor.

We think the cat is playing, but what is ‘playing’? The dictionary definition is doing something for enjoyment, and yet we don’t know that a cat necessarily enjoys attacking something it can’t actually stick in it’s mouth, which is where every other cat toy and other household item that catches their interest ends up. It’s instinctual, and one can argue that it’s a way of practicing hunting.

famous-cat-meme-which-started-and-launched-the-website-i-can-haz-cheezburger

You Can Haz Cheezeburger?
How would you feel if someone kept sticking a cheeseburger image in front of you? You’d practice grabbing it and would never get it. I don’t imagine it would be fun. Granted, moving laser dots on the carpet don’t have a taste other than carpet, but work with me.

Now take a breath and look around you every day and find the red dots in life. These are basically just some group of people trying to direct you to do something. Maybe it’s a good thing like washing your hands.

Maybe it’s a thing where when you’re hungry or thirsty, maybe that last sticky advertisement will guide your money to a place where you think you’ll get what you’re thinking you want.

I don’t even need to name food chains, they likely already popped into your heads. Maybe just the word ‘cheeseburger’ had you thinking of a particular food chain because you associate that word with their product.

no cheeseburger

The movie ‘Detached’ has a clip going around now about ubiquitous assimilation. It’s about those red dots and developing our minds beyond the quick and dirty memes that get passed around like a joint at a barbecue. They get passed around by people who never read Richard Dawkins books much less ‘The Selfish Gene’. They likely have no idea why we call them memes. They’re just memes, which occupy attention like little red dots. We have marketing trying to sell products, we have people trying to market their own ideas with memes, and then sometimes some of those memes work to the benefit of everyone.

And sometimes you just get a mouthful of something that’s blech. Sometimes you might get a good cheeseburger, sometimes you might get a bad cheeseburger, you never know. Social media has people, little ones too, just chasing red dots.

That particular scene from ‘Detached’ has Adrian Body’s masterful delivery of such a simple concept that we should not only be teaching children but also reminding adults of. If your clicky clicky ain’t getting you cheeseburgers you like, stop chasing them.

Criticism is often met by gaslighting, blaming an individual for not getting the cheeseburger that was shown. Somewhere in some very fine print that you need to have compound eyes to read there’s a catch somewhere. As we grow older we learn to expect them – but rarely read the fine print because… you effectively need compound eyes. Imagine having your lawyer look over every software license, copyright license, terms of service document… you’d get nothing done, and you need to get things done.

What do you need to get things done? Are you chasing red dots again? What are you actually accomplishing? Do you have a sense of accomplishment? Do you get the cheeseburger in your mouth feeling, or do you get the red dot on carpet taste?

We need to spend time on ourselves so that we are less susceptible to bullshit red dots. Shine your own for yourself.

And maybe think about what the cat wants when you play with it.

Demographics

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evolution tech smallLast week sometime, a passing acquaintance on Facebook referred to something he had written 10 years ago regarding joining the final demographic. It prompted me to think about marketing demographics and how I must have fit in, as a tribe of one.

After some thought, I realized I was maybe part of an interesting demographic to marketers for a period when I was… creative… in how I described myself to get magazine subscriptions for things I was interested in. These were days when you filled in a postcard that was provided in, for example, a magazine, and asked how much purchasing authority you had, and so on. Filled out right, you’d magically get stuff to read that was in a specific field. My mailbox was never empty, something always interesting to look over, opening new worlds to me.

So there was that. Perhaps for a while based on income, or spending habits, but those two were something could be creative about, at least for a period, and that generally came with some benefits. Trying some free samples out, telling them whether you thought it was good or bad. But then… generally, I was never a part of the demographic marketers look at because I have broad interests and have never just stuck to one thing very much. I was never an ideal demographic. Age wise, sure, I had my moments, I may still have them, but overall – I was never very interesting to marketers.

I made mistakes with credit cards early, which screwed up my credit rating, and then when people were talking about ‘cutting them up’, I simply stopped using them and something magical happened after a few years: I couldn’t do stuff because I had no credit history. That means that nobody really markets to you, since one of the demographics most sought after is those people who buy, buy, buy, and go in debt, debt, debt!

Even employers loved to see you get an expensive new car because then they were more secure that you wouldn’t leave. A new baby? Your employer hit paydirt! Ahh, those were the days. You could almost see the resignation in people’s faces when they had debt and the promise of future debt. Some people say it made them grow up. Mature. But really, what I saw was a measure of compliance with the way things worked. Equating that to maturity means a broken horse is mature, and a wild horse is a child.

Demographics. Now the world has no real need of those sorts of things other than for feeding bureaucracies. Marketers buy your information from wherever they can get it, and there is plenty of that still – or they just use one of the massive Big Tech companies with millions – billions- of users, run a few ads and see who responds, using the BigTech algorithms to go fishing for us.

Demographics. How long is that going to last for?