[url]https://quanticfoundry.com/2024/05/21/strategy-decline/[/url] [quote]Both percentiles and psychometrics are fairly abstract concepts and the magnitude of a drop to 33rd-%tile can be difficult to grok. To help anchor this finding, here are some real-world magnitude equivalents using more familiar metrics: It’s the equivalent of all men age 20+ in the US losing 17 pounds in weight. It’s the equivalent of all adult men (worldwide) losing 1.34 inches in height. It’s the equivalent of everyone (worldwide) losing 6.75 points of IQ.[/quote] [quote]There are many seemingly-related findings in terms of our media consumption habits. For example, over time, shorter YouTube videos have garnered a higher share of overall views. The duration of shots in movies (i.e., between each cut) has decreased from 16 seconds in 1930 to 4 seconds in 2010. The average time spent on a computer app window (e.g., on a Word doc before switching to a browser window) has decreased from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds in 2016. In this light, 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.[/quote] [quote]Even if the underlying cause(s) cannot be identified, it’s clear that gamers have become less interested in strategic thinking over the past 9 years. It implies that gamers are now more easily cognitively overloaded when they play games and are more likely to avoid strategic complexity. This has implications for game design and marketing. Overall, gamers now prefer shorter time horizons to plan for (i.e., the number of steps and branching outcomes they have to think through) and less complex decisions that rely on fewer parameters to consider. And for those of us who study gamers, typically in the more confined context of specific game titles/franchises, this finding may help explain observed changes among Strategy-related player segments over the past decade that we would otherwise have more likely attributed to game feature changes or COVID.[/quote]