Play whatever you want, I doubt you’re getting weird looks for playing anything in public.
I personally despise the mobile gaming industry as a whole for its propensity for going live service or shovelware in the vast majority of instances. Of course I can think of gems in the rough but in many cases it went for a business model I ended being disappointed in.
At the end of the day, the switch and steam deck are far preferable on the go gaming platforms that suit me much better.
personally, i still do it out of stubbornness. the old cell phone games weren't real games. they were less than old Atari games. as cell phones evolved, so did the games. eventually we get into the more modern era, and some cell phone games are more 'real' than older console games were.
i acknowledge that modern cell phone games, are often more of a real game than games we had back in the console days.
that said, i'll still consider them not real games for many years to come. don't worry what other people think. if you enjoy them, play them.
I wouldn’t call one “not a real game”. If you like them, great, play them. I have not been very happy with mobile games, myself, however.
A couple of reasons:
While they don’t have to do so, many mobile games appear to me to be designed to cater to people playing in short spurts. That is, you don’t have to build up a lot of metal state about the game; you can play a bit while waiting in a line or something, put the thing on hold, do something else, come back. A lot of my favorite games don’t work like that.
For a number of genres, using a touchscreen is a serious limitation, because part of the screen is obstructed by fingers. Phones can use external input devices, usually via Bluetooth, and so you can make a game that requires an external input device, but it’s an inconvenience to lug one around with a phone, so smartphone games generally need to be designed to be at least reasonably-able to be played on the touchscreen alone. That places some constraints on the way the game can work.
Touchscreen accuracy is limited compared to a mouse pointer, which again limits a number of genres of games.
Not everyone using a smartphone game can be playing sound while doing so; carrying headphones/earbuds around isn’t something that all players will do. That means that smartphone games generally need to be playable without sound, which is a constraint that PC games generally don’t have.
The major benefit smartphones have is that they’re mobile. A smartphone can generally run for a while, as long as most of that is idling. Playing games in most genres burns through their battery quickly. You can carry USB powerstations, but kind of a pain.
Even in genres – like turn-based ones – that really don’t need much battery consumption, for some reason, game developers – unlike developers of many other application types – often seem to feel the need to have stuff going on while nothing’s happening in the game, burning battery life. I’d like to have the option to minimize battery usage.
I would say that a greater proportion of smartphone games than PC games have in-app purchases and ads, neither of which I like.
Many game genres tend to benefit from a wider field of view. Smartphone screens held normally take up a very small portion of one’s visual field.
I am not particularly enthusiastic about having Google track and profile me. A large portion of the commercial games on Android require that one use Google Play Services and this requires a Google account. I’m not willing to get a Google account. This limits availability of many commercial games. I have no problem with getting a GOG account on the PC, and am at least less concerned about Valve, with Steam, than Google.
I have no idea why, but a higher percentage of mobile games seem to go for a cutesy, simplified vector aesthetic. Maybe it’s because they need to run on screens that may vary a great deal in size; I don’t know, but it’s there. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that style, but I’m not especially enthusiastic about it. The Game Boy had the same “cutesy” tendency back when, relative to larger, fixed consoles, so maybe it’s to deal with small screens.
Most mobile games I’ve played that I’ve liked (e.g. Shattered Pixel Dungeon) are also available on the PC, and I find that it’s more-comfortable to play there.
So for me, at least, the mobile gaming experience hasn’t really been one that I’ve been all that happy with.
I could certainly see games that I think would work well with a smartphone. Choice of Games-type multiple-choice interactive fiction, or gamebooks. Those are (or at least can be) light on a battery, are fine on a touchscreen. I’ve generally played those on a tablet rather than a phone – I think that even with those, more screen space is desirable, given the option – but I have done those, and I think that they’re all right. Annoyingly-enough, Twine games – which I would think could be a good match for mobile – aren’t, because Android browsers don’t have an ability to view file:// URLs and Twine builds pages that don’t always work well on small mobile screens. There hasn’t been the kind of explosion of freely-available games in this genre that there have been for the keyboard-oriented Z-Machine and TADS interactive fiction VMs on the PC, though.
Deckbuilding games – though I’d rather have ones without animation or 3D stuff going on, to reduce battery consumption – would be another possibility that I’d like. If cards are designed for a small screen, I think that it’d be reasonable.
Shit like this is why lemmy isn’t growing. Not everyone is a programmer Linux fanatic leftist who supports communism and wants to see spam posts about Kissinger. So if you’re one of the people who downvoted this post or got upset, take a moment to consider why people are annoyed and if this is the kind of behavior and variety that’s going to help us grow.
Bit of a mixed bag. Arctic monkeys and fall out boy makes sense as top 2. I think my music taste varies wildly enough that Katy Perry and P!nk must have just sneaked in there over other artists.
The kind of game I like to play usually have keys to move the characters, keys for actions, keys for selecting items or weapons, them the mouse to move the viewpoint, fire or block.
These controls map poorly to a slate of glass.
Even the games I used to play, like Tetris or platformers, work badly if you only have virtual buttons to press.
It may be fun for you, but I just can’t get the hang of it.
Personally I won't judge people for playing mobile games, there are some good ones out there, but most of the ones I've seen seem very streamlined towards player monetisation, or are slot-machines by a different name - it's the same reason I often won't play "Free to Play" games on PC either.
I'm curious as to what genre of games you play, because some absolutely would benefit from touchscreens (i.e. visual novels, point-and-click games), but I can imagine most others would fare better with traditional controls (even at the expense of portability)
Edit: Having actually seen these games you refer to, I can see they're very much part of that former category, and are very reminiscent of flash minigames I played as a kid. I would personally consider minigames as a different thing to games proper, as they're much more shallow experiences, so maybe that is what you're running into with people saying they're "not real games"
For those of you outside the U.S. who don’t know, Thanksgiving is basically a simultaneous celebration and revision of the genocide of the indigenous peoples of North America where people eat turkey and disgusting green bean slop.
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