From Fast-Paced to Faster-Paced. How Shorter Attention Spans Are Reshaping the Gaming Industry

According to recent accounts of various educational sectors, children of the current generation have shorter attention spans, presumably owing to the technological influence. This shift has some significant implications for a great many industries, not the least of which is the video game industry.

Contemporary games are, more and more, developed under a mainstream user perspective where acquisition of fun fast and entertainment is the name of the game. Success and failure of present day video games and the intertwining of this subject with the subject of diminished attention spans in children.

Digital technology revolution has opened enhanced information and entertainment. But this constant barrage of stimuli, which has been associated with decreasing child attention spans.

According to a study conducted by Fiedacan et al. (2018), in kindergarten pupils other factors, like overexposure to electronic gadgets, lack of interest in traditional activities and even poor health are some factors that lead to very short attention span.

This study demonstrates that these factors complicate children's ability to maintain attention with given tasks and consequently hinder their learning and participation in the classroom.

Those shifts in attention spans are not unseen, and the video game industry has noticed and adapted its products to them. Among younger audiences, games featuring instant gratification, rewards obtained quickly, and significant engagement levels have become increasingly popular. Fortnite and Call of Duty are just 2 out of many titles that indication this trend.

For example, players in Fortnite are plopped into fast, action packed environments where the point is immediate survival and being the best. The game offers quick matches, quick feedback through rewards, achievements and regular updates that keep content fresh. Call of Duty also gives you rapid gameplay, along with respawns that happen as soon as you respawn, making sure you don't have to wait too long to go back out there.

With short attention spans of their audience, these games are built to give out those dopamine hits regularly. The mechanics themselves aren’t overly complicated, getting them down quickly means you’re going to get into the game and feel its thrill almost immediately. This design philosophy fulfills a child’s need for fast engagement and rewards that are essential to the seduction of quick web content for children who are already used to instant gratification in other parts of their digital life.

It’s also interesting that many game developers are in their 30s or 40s, part of a generation that played games that sucked you in for hours and had greater patience. Classic gaming was often a complex narrative, a mind bending puzzle, and a lengthy play session. Sometimes there’s a generational gap: you’ve got people developing games that don’t suit the kind of audience you have.

It can be hard to maintain a balance between a developer’s creative vision and what the market is looking for. Though these games would consider value in terms of depth, complexity, and story telling to the market trends point towards immediate engagement and infinitely easily obtainable gratification. This change forces games' designers to reexamine their tactical strategy for designing games that are both enjoyable for short attention span focused players and experiential on creativity enrichment.

This shift hasn’t been successful for all games. The Finals is one of the few free to play games that has not met industry expectations. There is likely more than one factor that leads to this underperformance, and it could have to do with the mismatch of game design and an audience’s attention span.

If games don’t offer an instant reward and take hours to advance, players that expect immediate gratification will quickly become bored. If a game has a steep learning curve, complex mechanics or takes time to get, then children may not like it if they have shorter attention spans. Competition in the free-to-play market is also brutal, as established games absorb a lot of player attention, so it’s extremely difficult for newer ones to get any traction unless they offer something significantly more different or more immediately appealing.

The big one that gets trotted out there is the hypothetical example of Concord, which, as its name infers, was one of the 'biggest disasters' that now happen when games don't quite fit within the expectations of the current player base. A game that doesn’t win the player over quickly may lead to low engagement levels and eventually, commercial failure.

Although action video games have adapted to assist in acclimation to shorter attention spans through its immediate engagement, the data indicates that intensive play in such games could reduce a subject’s ability to maintain attention in other, more boring environments.

Action video gaming influences sustained attention performance in adolescents: Trisolini et al. (2018) In sustained attention tasks, non-action video game players had greater decrement in performance over time than action video game players; however, reversal implicit sequence effects in tasks requiring quick enumeration of items were greater for action video game players.

In fact, it calls attention to a sort of sequential paradox: games aimed at helping players play for shorter attention spans themselves may deteriorate their capacity to play for longer periods of time.

These games, with their immersive pace and lack of ‘real world’ stimulation, may end up being less engaging to children than other activities, and children may not perform well in academic settings, and other areas of life that require sustained focus.

Reduced attention spans are not just a phenomenon for amusement. The more kids fill their time with media that celebrates instant gratification, the less likely they may be ready to sit through boredom — to focus on a task that takes time or effort. This may have huge effects on their working career. The shift in this case has the potential to change learning because much of educational activity depends on sustained concentration and sometimes delayed rewards.

The challenges for educators and parents alike, is how to do this and to keep children engaged in activities which develop their attention span and patience. Some strategies that might mitigate the issue include incorporating gamified elements into learning, providing interactive and stimulating educational content and encouraging activities that require attention and perseverance.

It is a multifaceted issues brought by the digital environment, lifestyle factors and the nature of modern entertainment. With these changes, the video game industry responds by creating games that provide quick satisfaction and quick rewards and pull younger audiences in. But this adaptation raises concern about the long term would the lasting impact on children’s ability to stay focused and whether it might even reinforce shorter attention spans.

With the industry developing, developers, teachers, and parents must balance creating engaging content and growth of sustained attention. The current trends could lead to future research in designing games that are both entertaining and beneficial for cognitive development in order to mitigate the risks associated with those trends.

References

• Fiedacan, K., Fetizanan, A., Jumantoc, E., Mabituin, A., Yanson, M., & Francisco, R. (2018). Kindergartens’ Short Attention Span in School: A Case Study. International Scholars Conference, 6, 313-313. https://doi.org/10.35974/ISC.V6I1.1316
• Trisolini, D., Petilli, M., & Daini, R. (2018). Is action video gaming related to sustained attention of adolescents? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71(5), 1033-1039. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2017.1310912