With the arrival of cells phones, internet and information overload, people now tend to have a short attention span which makes people unable to focus more than 10 or 15 minute without having the need to do something else.
This has major drawback to board game design because those people do not seem to be willing to play games longer than an hour. Of course we can make shorter games, but sometimes a certain experience can only be reached after a certain time is investment. Also, sometimes you want to play a game which has more meat.
So I was trying to see if there could be methods or techniques that could be used to keep people with short attention span into the game.
One thing that came into my mind is to take advantage of down time. Many games like eclipse, twilight imperium and arkham horror divides the turn in micro turns. This has the "advantage" of making the player always focused into the game and there are no longer period of time where the player does not play the game, they are always playing.
But for people with short attention span, that could be a nightmare. So may be if players played 1 turn at a time, player could be doing other thing while other are playing. Maybe that could be more convenient for short attention span people.
Probably having a balance between both poles could be essential for the transition, but eventually when everybody has short attention span problem, all game will have to avoid the constantly engaged mechanics.
Can you think of other solutions?
Do you have personal experience to share with short attention span people?
Interesting content
I always said that technology needed to be the slave of the humans ... but not the opposite.