Phone Break

Have you ever wondered why nowadays the videogames that dominate the market focus more on a fun multiplayer rather than long and interesting story? Why does the game based on Aliens, a movie that favors tension over action, try to mimic the formula of every generic shooter that has come out in the last decade? What ever happened to the RPGs of the era of the Playstation One and Two? What is the reason behind the huge popularity of phone games such as Angry Birds and Cut The Rope? This change is attributed to a change in mentality in the new generation of people. People nowadays don't have time to play a game that is several hours long, and, if they have time, they lose interest before reaching the end and switch to another game. The multiplayer games are better suited for this new mentality. An average match of FIFA lasts about ten minutes, and Call of Duty matches last no more than five. And if you were to play another game, it is much easier to come back and play a quick match than to try to catch back up in a story. However, despite the shallowness, there are still games sold at full retail price. It is the cheap app games that fully exploit this change in mentality. If you want some quick entertainment, you can just pay a couple of dollars and get still get your money's worth. It is like buying a bag of chips rather than a full meal when you are just a little hungry. Short boosts of entertainment is what is considered as ideal in the current market.

However, this mentality isn't limited to videogames only. In Reality Hunger's thirteenth chapter, "m in praise of brevity," Shields includes various phrases regarding this phenomenon. Brevity is now favored in literature as well. However, Shields includes an interesting reason behind this preference with phrase 383 that states "It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book -- what everyone else does not say in a book." What this is trying to say is that, if the text is too long, the message or purpose can be lost in all the words. It is better to be concise and clear than to be wordy and ambiguous. In Kate Salter's article "Brief Lives" regarding the writer, Michael Kimball, who writes short life stories in the back of postcards, a new perspective is shown regarding short texts. The writer writes that "the postcard doesn't sum up my life, but what got me to where I am now. It's a snapshot of a moment. There's a strong sense of hope and joy in it that, while I don't identify with it every day, makes me feel happy when I read it." There is just something very compelling about simplicity when everything around us is so complicated. Whether it is a phone game or a short text, brevity the relaxant that people need nowadays.