Nostalgia Is Ruining Video Games

[tthurman]

A bit dated for sure.

Can't say I agree with this; well perhaps the  memories part.  Isn't more like it's expanding the gaming community by bringing back those of us who long for the simplicity of games from days gone by, or actually having really good titles to play?

Still, it's an interesting point of view.

[hansolo77]

The thing is, most of our OLD games dealt with a level of randomness that today's games just don't offer anymore.  So the replay value of modern games is lacking.  Sure, they might have a high score feature to keep things interesting, or hard-to-get achievements/trophies.  But really, once you've played it, there's no real reason to anymore.  "Back in the day", games were more random, and things could get interesting.  I'll grant you, not all titles had random, but a lot of the good ones did.

[tthurman]

I love so many old arcade games from back in the day I played them, but usually when i fire my rig up, games I rarely played are my first choice.  Mrs Pac-Man and BurgerTIme, 19XX, none of these I regularly played at the arcade, but they typically get a round or two (Q-bert especially once I get a dedicated stick for it),.....then my old fav's like DK and SW, Joust.....followed by a bunch of games I've discovered since then that I never knew before.  The difficulty increase with all of these seemed to be speed, or number of enemies, but it just worked.  You can play them, and walk away for a better day another day, with no strings attached!

I just didn't have enough quarters to try them all back then, and I missed a lot of great games because of it.

The PC expanded on gaming so much, but almost too much as time went on, or at least I got burned out from some of it.  Classes; yeah I get that, but the deep inventory systems....and ranking, geesh, that got so complex that some of them became more work than fun!

[shroud]

Yep, that was definitely an interesting article, even tho I had some trouble "connecting" to some of its points because my own personal definition of "retrogames" implies at least about 20 years of age

 

But I know that I started being a retrogamer out of pure nostalgia, when I was in my early 20s, which occurred in the late 90s. It was the time when the internet really took off in my country, and this meant that an unprecedented amount of "old stuff" became suddenly available. Three things mainly ignited my nostalgia: 80s pop radio hits, japanese anime, and Commodore 64 games, all of which had been major cultural items of my pre-teen years (80s movies too, but those were largely still aired on TV at the time). 

 

However... when I fire up my GameEx, I rarely play something just because of nostalgia. Maybe I am delusional about it, but I kind of feel like I pick the games which are really still fun to play. And I love discovering true jems which I missed back then. I always say that pure fun has little to do with technical quality, which generally is of course a good thing, but occasionally it even gets in the way of fun (the typical example is games which are so graphically "heavy" that they distract the player from the actual gameplay).

[shroud]

On 5/24/2017 at 5:37 AM, tthurman said:

The difficulty increase with all of these seemed to be speed, or number of enemies, but it just worked.  You can play them, and walk away for a better day another day, with no strings attached!

...

The PC expanded on gaming so much, but almost too much as time went on, or at least I got burned out from some of it.  Classes; yeah I get that, but the deep inventory systems....and ranking, geesh, that got so complex that some of them became more work than fun!

I totally hear what you're saying...

 

I actually like playing both retro and contemporary games. I have a small collection of the latter, and not because of the cost of the originals, but because they are indeed a longer-term effort to play. There is a huge gap between the short & immediate fun of old Coin-Ops vs the continuous advancement in modern games. But the differences come naturally from the media used to deliver the games:

 

1) Coin-Ops were designed as a pay-per-play entertainment. This meant that one play was supposed to last a short time, not too short (to avoid players feeling they were getting robbed) but short enough to require soon another coin or let the next player play. Remember the flyer saying "Q*Bert collects quarters!" ?  Not much depth was needed in those games.

 

2) Early home computers & consoles games introduced more depth, because you were now spending more money to buy a title once and for all. The games variety was enormous however, so we can't judge them all as one. But unprecedented stuff like CRPG, championship sports games, strategy games and graphic adventures were born, which could have never been coin-ops.

 

3) As flat internet subscriptions (not charged by connection time) became the norm, online gaming exploded, and this caused another massive shift in game design. For many games, the idea became that the player should invest a lot of time training to get better and more competitive, focusing on a few favourite games instead of wasting time not getting much better in a lot of titles. Some companies decided to implement a subscription model for selling their games, which encourages this behaviour.

 

4) Smart phones got much better, and now the oldest way of gaming (the short, quick fun) became popular once again, with a lot of people playing while travelling or while waiting for something. But this time the shortquickfun has a twist, in the idea that on a smartphone you can always continue the game from where you left, and never have to start it over. Incremental puzzle games and simple skill-based games (e.g. Angry Birds) where it takes a minute to complete a level, but offer hundreds of levels and plenty of expansions, are the perfect kind of games, with small prices (and sometimes progressive micropayments) being the perfect kind of pricing.

 

So it's not just that "the gamers have changed their tastes in how they want to play", it's that the available technology and associated pricing schemes have a lot of influence

 

But as you say, the early arcade model just worked, and it definitely still works for a lot of people like me, who between work & family & life won't have time to sit down for hours to play through a complete adventure or skip sleep over a MMORPG (at least not until retirement), but can play only those 15 minutes every now and then.

[shroud]

And if you let me add what's up next for the near future...

 

5) New user interfaces will be the focus in the upcoming years, to open up totally new ways to play games. There have been already attempts in the past years, starting with the Wii and then Kinect, Oculus Rift etc... mixed results but the failures are due only to those technologies being still in their infancy. They will get better, and once they reach the right price/quality point, they will be massive, especially Augmented Reality.

[tthurman]

Excellent post(s), very insightful, and spot on IMO.

I'm sure at some point I'll go back to PC gaming just for a change of pace, that and I have a library of unplayed titles