Meme Theory and Game Replayability - A Random Musing

[Sirian]

Memes are information that spread through a population via communication rather than through genes, which carry information through biological reproduction.

If you aren't already familiar with the concept, I recommend that you Watch this Sci-Scow video on YouTube if you wish to understand the point of this thread.

I am a regular watcher of Sci-Show. (I also like PBS space-time). I find it to be one of the most interesting and useful channels on YouTube.


Anyway, while watching the above-linked video, there was one section where the speaker talks about our brains having an inherent defense against memes that offer no survival benefits but only entertainment, which leads us to render them "old" or "obsolete", block them out and move on in search of new ideas.

A lightbulb went off in my head. This sounds very much like the process of losing interest in a video game. The idea behind any video game, no matter how sound and entertaining, eventually grows old, loses fun factor. Loses newness and a sense of relevance. Loses ability to hold the player's attention.

If this idea is valid, then we are genetically wired to tire of any given video game and move on from it.


Some game designers purposely try to engage addiction centers in the brain to work around this. Some players, for instance, can be persuaded to spend huge amounts of money on in-app purchases in "pay to win" games, which are designed on principles similar to gambling games, with payouts and rewards engineered to mix with baked-in frustrations that can be overcome by spending more money.

However, even game designers with a more classically honorable intention of providing entertainment and charging a fair price for it may benefit from a greater understanding of Memes (and Meme Theory). The coveted "positive word of mouth" that designers crave to earn from players, where the meme that is the game itself gets recommended around and builds up sales, is itself a form of meme.

"Figuring out what will be fun to play" may be another form of meme theory. Fun mechanics often have things in common, at least within a genre, but they must also evolve over time, because no matter how great a game may be, it will "grow old" eventually and need to be replaced by another idea, even if that mutated idea is largely similar to an earlier design.

If these ideas are mostly true, then we are also genetically wired to prefer sequels over new games. If there is a beloved meme that lasted much longer than average and granted more joy during its life span, we might mourn our inability to garner more fun out of it -- and crave a similar new idea, with enough mutation but also still true enough to the old idea, to relive the fun through a sequel. The mutation aspect becomes both our friend and our enemy, as few sequels will ever manage to recapture the old fun in all the critical ways that made it so enduring. Sometimes they bring an equal or greater new fun, but mostly they just disappoint.


OK, that's it for my musing, at the moment. If you were entertained or intrigued, please contribute to this thread so its own lifespan will increase, rather than becoming one of the majority of new memes that die a quick death in obscurity, because nobody cared about it.            


- Sirian

[Lewwyn]

I also regularly watch Scishow and find it to be very stimulating. I also watched this Meme video and immediately thought of games too and how certain games I reach a point where my interest immediately dies and I must move on to find a new game. True replayability is hard to come by. Case in point, I recently played Halcyon 6 and really enjoyed my first play through. On my second play through there simply wasn't enough variation on the original path and I found that my brain was quickly rejecting it. I put it down for a moment and I haven't touched it since. Perhaps when I've forgotten it enough I will come back to it, but I fear if it hasn't been patched/updated enough the result will be the same.

I've seen this with games a lot where I will start them and if it doesn't "infect" me I often do not have the will to keep playing. My games library is littered with games that my brain has vaccinated itself against. Any game that I'm "over" is very close to dead for me. Any attempt to play it becomes work as I'm fighting my own brain trying to enjoy it. I literally have had experiences where I say to myself, "come on you are supposed to be having fun."

I feel lucky to have experienced games that do not feel like work.

[Sareln]

Anyway, while watching the above-linked video, there was one section where the speaker talks about our brains having an inherent defense against memes that offer no survival benefits but only entertainment, which leads us to render them "old" or "obsolete", block them out and move on in search of new ideas.

A lightbulb went off in my head. This sounds very much like the process of losing interest in a video game. The idea behind any video game, no matter how sound and entertaining, eventually grows old, loses fun factor. Loses newness and a sense of relevance. Loses ability to hold the player's attention.

If this idea is valid, then we are genetically wired to tire of any given video game and move on from it.

If the game is MP, do we bypass this brain-circuit b/c it triggers the human-to-human competition circuits instead? That might explain some of the longevity of team-based competitive MP games.

[Sirian]

If the game is MP, do we bypass this brain-circuit b/c it triggers the human-to-human competition circuits instead? That might explain some of the longevity of team-based competitive MP games.

I would think "not entirely".

There are some MP video games I could go back and play more of today, and perhaps endlessly, but some of these underwent ongoing mutations in the forms of new maps to play on, new players to play against, etc. These changes (and others like them) may suffice to refresh the core idea and keep it relevant for longer.

There are also plenty of MP games I'm done with for keeps, though -- and some SP games I'm done with that I'd revisit if they offered new content to play.


I'd suggest that MP can greatly enhance the replayable life of a game, but only the best-designed (and most popular) MP games offer ongoing ambrosia that keeps the design fresh for multiples of years. (This could be extended to board games, too, I believe.)


- Sirian

[antisocialmunky]

I just think about it like games these days being restaurants. The good ones are the ones that gave you an enjoyable experience or good food and you go back to. The bad ones are like the restaurants you try once and then never go back to because it was lacking in those qualities. Some restaurants you go back to because there's a specific circumstance and others you go back to because its timeless.

Before you guys get too far, I'd like to point out that there are also problems with Mr. Dawkin's theories on memes and genetics (See: The Selfish Gene) in that they are extremely reductionist because as he said him self, he tried to find the minimum unit of information that could be used for calculations of fitness. Its like breaking down a a food to just the ingredients or a game to its mechanics and judging them purely by those criteria. To to use a practical example, look at Civ5 and Civ4. Civ5 was much more focused on adding different mechanics and systems that acted mostly independently while Civ4's systems were fewer and more intertwined and balanced with each other.

If you were to evaluate purely by a memetic fitness function that looked something like:

Game 'Fun-ness' = C1 * MECHANIC1 + C2 * MECHANIC2 + ... + Cn * MECHANICn

Where Cn is the 'fun-ness' of a mechanic and MECHANICn = 0 or 1 for existence of non existence of a mechanic.

Then you'd expect Civ5 which straight up offers more mechanics (memes) to have higher replayability just because one of those mechanics would be really fun to someone statistically but here we are still running tons of Civ4 games.

So I think there's something to said about the interplay of mechanics (memes) when evaluating the fun-ness (fitness) of a game (idea).