Recently I came across a study on preferences among gamers. As it turns out, gamers nowadays enjoy any kind of strategic aspect in their games a lot less than they used to, from more than 50% in 2016 to around 35% in 2024. This is a staggering decline. Here is the chart:

This decline happens regardless of sex or location, even outside of the Western world. On that note, the Chinese seem to be surprisingly uninterested in games involving strategic thinking, as another study claims. There are some speculations in the study, for instance references to people preferring short-attention-span content such as TikTok videos. All of this is couched in very politically correct language, speaking about mere correlations but not causation. My view is that attention spans are at an all-time low. Most certainly, smartphones have to be blamed for this. Nowadays there is entertainment available anywhere you are and if you do not want to be intellectually challenged, such content will not come your way.

The ubiquity of smartphones has been undermining an entire generation already but it is not only “zoomers” or “alphas” who are affected. Even in my generation I see plenty of people who are completely addicted to their phone. Maybe you are not immune to this either. For instance, when was the last time you read a book? Yes, an ebook counts, albeit physical books certainly pose a much higher barrier to entry. Similarly, when was the last time you felt bored? Moments of boredom commonly lead to you thinking about yourself or the world. In my case, many of my blog posts start with me just sitting down and doing nothing. Then an idea pops up in my head and I commence thinking about it. I am surely not particularly unique in this regards. Probably any kind of creative activity is irreconcilable with extensive smartphone usage. Yet, if I look at people around me, I sometimes feel as if I belong to a different species.

I think there is a very clear cause-and-effect relationship, i.e. smartphones provide an instant and never-ending dopamine drip. Thus, they change how you live your life. Before you know it, your phone is the most important part of your entire existence, and everything centers around it. People check their phone on average 144 times per day. This number is down, but presumably only because overall phone usage is way up. People who reduce their existence to responding or reacting to whatever their phone throws at them obviously cannot focus on anything for longer than a few minutes. This arguably explains why bite-sized content like TikTok videos are so popular. This trend also affects games. Thus, some genres have the problem that their playerbase is aging. Real-time strategy or grand-strategy games, where one gaming session could take one to two hours, if not more, and players are expected to plan ahead, sometimes quite far ahead, are fundamentally incompatible with this lifestyle. There would need to be a special version of a game like Civilization for the TikTok generation to make it palatable for that crowd but this is probably not feasible.

A lot of people have commented on the disappearance of video game manuals. In the 1990s game manuals used to be very detailed, providing a thorough explanation of game mechanics or a fleshed out account of the game’s lore. The manual of the first Baldur’s Gate is about 90 pages thick, the first Diablo, a rather simplistic hack-and-slash game, has around 80 pages, the JRPG classic Chrono Trigger comes with a rather colorful 90-page manual. Simulation games were in an entirely different league, though. Sim City 2000 has a manual that is about 150 pages long and goes quite in-depth. The though that an IQ95 normie could make it through this text is laughable. You need a basic understanding of economics and finance for this game. More interestingly, this manual lists a few dozen references, primarily of an academic nature. Today, you could not sell such a game to a wider audience that expects everything to be “gamified” and easily accessible.

If you cannot sit down and pursue any task for more than just a few minutes you likely will not be effective at anything that requires just a modicum of intelligence. Thus, even if actual IQ levels are higher than what widespread and excessive smartphone usage would imply, it is still the case that people act as if they are stupid. We are seeing this in gaming today, but the impact in the workforce and society will probably only be felt within a few more years.