Also? Cave Story. It’s relatively short, and it doesn’t require any grinding, so there’s no sense of ‘work’ (I thought, anyway), and it’s got a really engaging and interesting plot.
That’s really what I meant by turn-based (ie., different views for combat), but I couldn’t think what else to call it.
No worries; I just thought it worth pointing out because several prominent JRPGs (Star Ocean, Tales of, specifically) use the ‘zoom to arena’ method, but also have realtime combat engines.
I thought of another one as well - branching dialogue. Many/Most WRPGs offer the player dialogue choices when interacting with an NPC, because, again, it’s the ‘player’s character’ and they get to decide if they want to flick off the old man or go find his tome for him - at least, to some extent. In a JRPG, the personality of the main character is predetermined, so the player doesn’t get to decide how he reacts to things. This leads to some people finding JRPGs too scripted, and others finding the stories of WRPGs too watered down (since the designers need to account for intractable players.).
Lifelong gamer, starting at around the original Pac-Man (y’know, before he got into death-defying adventuring and driving ridiculously fast Corollas), maybe a bit earlier. I’ve seen just about every era, evolution, fad, gimmick, delight, shock, and controversy video games had to offer. I can say with total confidence what the three massive hurdles are:
Money. The one constant about this hobby, regardles of your platform or tastes, is that it’s freaking expensive. The basic system alone will set you back $200 minimum, new games are $55 at the absolute minimum, and nowadays even used games usually run for at least $25. Don’t even get me started on computers, a black hole of cash and frustration if I’ve ever seen one. Then there are the various peripherals (and don’t kid yourself, you aren’t doing anything without a few of these), anywhere from $30 for a no-rapid fire no-keymapping no-nuthin’ controller to $100 for a quality drum kit. (You can guess how I found out about the latter figure.) And of course, there’s all that delicious downloadable content, which make your games complete and separate you from even more cash. At least you don’t have cheat devices to worry about anymore, another $20-30 right there, and another another $20-30 every time it became obsolete, proved to be defective, or didn’t have the codes you wanted. (I currently have three cheat devices for my PS2, and I need them all. Partly because of the three other cheat devices, one of which became obsolete, one…you get the idea.)
Commitment. If you have other obligations taking up a lot of your time…like, say, children…you’re going to have a hard time even finding games that are right for you, much less getting any good at them. Even in a simple golf or music game, there are so many things to keep track of and remember. In a typical first-person shooter, you have to remember a lot and have lightning reflexes and make adjustments on the fly. I don’t even want to talk about RPGs. (Ultima 3 had me climbing the walls. Ultima 3.) And even a relatively casual game is going to demand your full attention; you won’t have the luxury of answering the phone, channel surfing, getting caught up on your reading, doing the laundry, etc., unless you like getting stomped into the ground every 30 seconds.
Difficulty. Why did it take so long for girls and parents to get into video games? Because they’re too freaking hard! In particular, anything with infuriatingly remote checkpoints (this is what made Ghosts 'n Goblins torture), way too many threats to deal with at once (e.g. 19XX, and that’s kindgergarten compared to modern shoot-'em-ups), ridiculous requirements (hello, Gran Turismo!), or overly-complex controls (did someone say Tenchu?) is going to be a major turnoff. (And please, for the love of Gill, don’t get me started on fighting games.) And there’s no respite for anyone that comes up even a little short. It’s black and white, put up or shut up, victory or total destruction. Land on the latter side too many times, this whole stupid hobby is going to look a lot less appealing.
I should point out that how the game is designed, and in particular what is and isn’t required, play a HUGE role in how enjoyable a game is. Take the first Guitar Hero. For the most part, it’s a blast, and not painful at all. The emphasis is on shredding and jamming and rocking out and racking up high scores; the rock meter is just to keep you honest. Fine and good…except that each difficulty (Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert) has its own level, meaning that to reach the end of the game, you have to clear every song on every difficulty. Furthermore, you start out with only 5 songs selectable, and on the latter two levels, you have to clear all 5 to get the next batch (4/5 on the easier levels). If you can’t clear I Wanna Be Sedated on Expert, too bad, you’re stuck in that cramped, smelly basement forever. The requirements just get worse in 2 and Rocks The 80’s, where on every difficulty there’s one “encore” song in each set you absolutely must clear or you are not advancing. (Never worse than Rocks The 80’s, which has Because It’s Midnite in the second batch. Y’know the one where the Expert chart has about 2,000 notes in the middle section?)
Guitar Freaks (Konami of Japan’s precursor to Guitar Hero), notechart-for-notechart, is several times more painful, but the thing is that I don’t HAVE to pass any of the murderiously horrific Expert charts. I try, I fail, I shrug, I get on with my life. If I came close, I may try it several times to get it, but I’m not going to lose any sleep if I don’t. In fact, not being able to clear a song on any difficulty…and the way this franchise is going, that’s a definite possibility…isn’t the end of the world. Because it’s not required for anything!
To be fair, it’s a HOBBY. That’s what hobbies do. Consume time and money. What’s a cheap hobby? Knitting? Nope! Fishing? Nope! Golf? Negatory. I guess watching sports is cheap, once you buy the big screen TV.
Again, it’s pretty much the point of a hobby to consume lots of time. It’s what they are for. My wife does beading. It consumes hours on end.
And I continue to protest this idea that games cannot be put down without grievous consequences. Yes, fine, if you insist on playing multiplayer, you can’t just drop everything, but believe it or not, multiplayer games are still the minority.
And again, there are whole genres of games that defy this categorization too. This is probably your best point, but again, difficulty doesn’t keep people away from a lot of hobbies. (Golf and fishing, above, for starters.)
Every one of those is cheaper than gaming.
Knitting: you only have to pay for the materials you need on the one project you are working on. You can get started for $50 easy, if not a lot less.
Fishing: I guess you need a pole and bait. Again, you can get started for $50 or less.
Golf: Well, that could be expensive if you have to buy all the clubs yourself. But I’ve seen people start with sets costing $150. And you can split that with friends.
Gaming: Either you need a console ($250+) or a new graphics card, if not a new computers, as non-gamers tend to have older computers. I can’t put a cost on that, but I’ve been told I needed a $150 card if I wanted to game on my machine at all. And then I have to buy the game itself. It’s hard to justify spending that much money just to see if you’d like it.
Or, you can be like me and be a retro gamer. As a kid, I always got the systems as the newer one was coming out, and people would sell them for cheap. (I got a PS1 for $10 once). I haven’t done that so much as I’ve gotten older, but I use emulators a lot, and pick up games from the bargain bin.
As for the OP: What frustrates me now is that camera has to move so much. Lately, too much camera movement makes me feel sick. Even in 2D games where the camera doesn’t move at the same speed as the character can make me nauseous.
It’s quite frustrating to have games I can’t play anymore. But prior to that, my worst frustrations that there seemed to be two different types of games: long ones that are hard, and short ones that are easy. I want easy and long. I’m trying to have fun, not be skilled. Also, I’m not sure how much it applies now, but I hated games that didn’t make it clear what you needed to do. Only give me a sandbox after you’ve led me by the hand for a while, so I know what the game is like.
RPgs are challenging long and often difficult puzzles. They require patience. They can take a lot of time. Then the game never repeats itself because there are so many choices to make during play. I don’t really feel any frustration, just challenge.
I also like Civilization, Medieval and that type game too. Nobungas Ambition, Romance of the 3 Kingdoms ,strategy games are fun too.
I don’t like shooters or the spawn of Castlevania either.
I don’t think you understand how much it costs to play a round of golf.
I think that, at some fundamental level, they’re afraid of plants emerging from pipes and shooting fireballs at them, and they just can’t overcome this fear.
Thanks for dragging out my repressed trauma. Now I need to spend the next 4 hours in a fetal position in the corner. 
I liked computer games until the mid-90s decline of the adventure game/rise of the first-person shooter. I would honestly rather sit and stare off into space than play a first-person shooter. Most of the RPGs I’ve encountered are only slightly less boring.
I like some strategy games (Civilization, Age of Empires) and some sim games (most notably The Sims), but these can suck up a lot of time and I generally avoid them these days. I have enjoyed some of the European adventure games produced in the past decade, but they’ve all been annoying and frustrating in ways that the classic adventure games were not.
I’ve played The Longest Journey, Syberia I & II, and Still Life, and with the exception of Syberia I they all had disappointing endings. This ties in with what ArchiveGuy was saying. If I spend 15 or 20 hours playing a game, I expect there to be a real ending in which things are actually resolved. It shouldn’t just STOP. In The Longest Journey and Syberia II you do at least accomplish the main character’s primary mission, but things end there with no dénouement. A number of plot threads are simply abandoned, and it’s not clear what’s going to happen to the main characters. Still Life was by far the worst offender, in that it’s a mystery game where you don’t get to solve the mystery. I could tolerate the fact that the mysterious masked killer gets away in the end, but you don’t even get to identify him!
I also felt that these newer adventure games were marred by tedious puzzles that could only be solved through extensive trial-and-error and way too much “you can’t do this until you do that” even when the two tasks are unrelated or the second task is obvious even without the first. I’d also like to single out Still Life again for having several lengthy, boring puzzles that lead nowhere. At one point the game grinds to a halt so the protagonist, an FBI agent investigating a serial killer, can work out her grandmother’s coded gingerbread cookie recipe. Really. That chapter of the game will only end once you’ve figured out how to make the damn cookies, but this accomplishes absolutely nothing within the context of the story. The protagonist’s dad asks her to make the cookies, but he isn’t moved to share any old family stories (which in this game might have been highly relevant) when she’s done. You don’t have to give anyone a cookie later in the game to get them to help you, use a cookie in a puzzle, or use your recipe-decoding skills to solve other puzzle. The cookies are never even mentioned again. It’s just an obnoxious, boring obstacle to getting on with the rest of the game.
Clearly, you know no serious knitters. Yeah, you can make a chintzy scarf for like $50, but that’s not knitting for a hobby, that’s making a chintzy scarf.
Heh! As someone who used to be a fisherman, I can assure you, this is not the case. First off, to do much in the way of fishing one needs, at minimum, rod, reel, line, hooks, and probably some sort of float or bobber, to say nothing of a license. To be a hobby fisherman, you are also free to invest in lures, weights, multiple rods, and gimmicry the likes of which would make your gaming budget cringe. Fishing fills entire catalogs with gimmicks for enthusiasts.
Golf also requires a course. Those are not trivial.
Aren’t you sortof refuting your own point here?
Anyway, yes you can spend a ton of money on gaming. Just like you can spend $1,700 on a fishfinder/GPS . Or you can drop $60 on a used PS2 and have access to a huge library of very inexpensive titles. Or, in fact, play very good games on the PC you have today. No fancy ass graphics card update required.
Will they be the brand spiffing new games that all the hardcore hobbyists are playing? No, but then, you wouldn’t be playing golf with that $5,500 set of irons, or knitting with the $100 alpaca yarn either.
Could you make a case that gaming has a higher barrier to entry? Maybe. Though I don’t think it’s anywhere near as much higher as you make it out to be. On the flipside, what gaming DOESN’T have is the ability to blow huge sums of money on “bleeding edge” stuff. Well, okay, you might be able to make a case for this in PC gaming, but it’s much less the case lately than it used to be.
Certainly, in the console space, you can have a LOT of fun for a relatively modest sum of money. If you can resist the marketing from Sony and Microsoft telling you that you need the PlayBoxX 3-Elite - brand new and yours for only $500. (Which is hyperbole, since these days, you can get a very servicable console from any major manufacturer for $300.
To be honest, it’s probably very intimidating to play a first-person shooter against a 1920s Style “Death Ray.” Especially if you’re starting with just a revolver or something.
One thing I’ve noticed about non-gamers is, if you hand them an Xbox or Playstation controller, 90% of the time the reaction is: Good Lord, lookit all the buttons on that thing! People that play video games routinely don’t have much trouble picking up a new game and figuring it out, people that don’t play games are usually intimidated by even simple games.
One of my sisters was an avid non-gamer, refused to play any type of games and just didn’t want to have anything to do with them. Then they got a Wii for the kids, and she got REALLY into that. The controller is relatively simple compared to the two I mentioned above, the games they got were simple and fun. I think she got into the Wii sports and Guitar Hero first, then Lego Starwars/Batman/Indy Jones. Now she’s playing Facebook games and confessed recently that she’s addicted to them. I still can’t see her getting into a RPG or FPS though.
For me personally, what frustrates me is how little innovation some games have. Every RPG seems to come out of the same mold, there’s tons of Diablo/Wow clones out there. But very few of them actually try to do something different.
Again, the “trick” to getting new people into gaming is to cut the confusion. Don’t give them some game like Shadow Complex where when you start this gruesome diagram of a controller with 7000 commands mapped onto it pops up.
Start them with something like Zuma or Katamari Damacy where you really only care about one stick and a button, or two sticks, in the case of KD. First person shooters are probably the absolute worst things to try to teach people with. Okay, maybe RTS’s are worse. maybe.
I don’t really enjoy games, period. Several of my friends really love all kinds of games and regularly have board game nights, or have poker nights. I nearly inevitably ended up in the next room, watching board games with the kids. (I moved away, which is why I use the past tense; they’re still my friends.) I played video games a couple times in junior high with friends who had Nintendos and generally didn’t really care that much. I certainly never wanted to get my own console, and I have no desire to start playing World of Warcraft or whatever now. It just doesn’t interest me.
No maybe about it. A FPS, you can say, this stick (or four buttons) moves, this stick (mouse) aims, this button shoots, and they’ll be able to play at least on a basic level. In an RTS… way more complicated.
I play games. I’m not fond of board games, but will play them to be social. I play MMORGs with my husband, but honestly, play them mostly with my husband for the social aspect of something we do together - on my own I play things like Sudoku or Minesweeper.
But to me, its a little like “why do/don’t you knit.” I find needlework and most online gaming to be very similar - a repetitive way to engage your mind at a low level and keep your hands busy. There is some variation, the yarn you choose, the pattern you choose to knit - the game you choose to play - but really, I think its a way to keep your mind/hands busy.
I dunno. Fundamentally, RTS controls are very simple. You click on the little guy, or drag a box around him, and click on where you want him to go or what you want him to shoot.
RTS mechanics are really ugly to explain.
FPS’s are the reverse. The mechanics tend to boil down to “shoot the other guy” but the controls are very hard for beginners to grasp. They’ll have trouble with the concept of “move sideways” vs “turn”. They’ll need to know how to change weapons. Jump. Secondary fire.
And then there’s disorientation. First Person games are notoriously hard for beginners to keep their feet in.
It probably depends on the beginner.
I used to be a huge gamer. From the late '80’s to the mid '90’s, I played just about every major PC game available.
I got sick of it and stopped for several reasons:
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First and foremost, I realized that I had a flaw in my personality causing me to want to be recognized for achievement and I desired attention. When I realized it, my desire to become the best at every game simply vanished.
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I would say about 3 out of 5 games weren’t worth buying, and out of the 2 games left, they often had severe issues with gameplay and weren’t even usable until the 2nd or 3rd patch. Maybe 1 out of 10 games were actually keepers. I think CivNet was the last game I bought sight-unseen.
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The death of TBS (turn-based strategy.) By far, this was my favorite genre. When Doom/Quake took over the market (I was one of those users who got motion sickness) the TBS games simply disappeared, and the death knell was probably when Microprose went bankrupt. To this day, I still play Master of Magic, Master of Orion 1 and 2, and MechCommander, and I’m trying to get X-Com to run on my system.
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Boredom. The last major game I played was Diablo 2:Lod, for about 4 years. After creating all the major builds, getting all the major equipment, it just became too boring to continue. I didn’t even load it on my new computer yet.