What is it that makes today's games unpalatable?

[temnix]

I don't quite know what it is about games from the 90s, but they had something that today's games don't, and because those don't, I can't stomach them. This quality may have been present in games from earlier years, too, even probably, but I wasn't playing in the 80's. It doesn't have anything to do with gameplay or even artistic execution, though the latter was undoubtedly superior. Just listen to the music in Baldur's Gate or Torment or look at the backgrounds. (A simple thought once struck me, looking at some fine paperbacks from the 1970s, that before computers, Photoshop automation and clip art, the ability to ACTUALLY draw was the only way a picture could be made.) No, neither gameplay nor talent. Those things get discussed enough, but I'm missing something else, something like juice in a piece of fruit. Freedom is the closest synonym. I remember some games from back then that I didn't even like, don't like to this day, for instance, Still Life, the adventure, yet they had THIS.

Was it that the designers didn't feel obligated to be thoroughly logical or true to reality? There was a puzzle in that game where I had to guide a wall-climbing robot past and between laser rays, some of them moving, which I just cheated to bypass, because it was so infuriating. And the reason for bothering with the robot was to have it crack open a supercomputer vault in the basement of an FBI station - all this perpetrated by the main character, who was an FBI agent herself. So she tricked her boss, sneaked to an off-limits area, used this robot to get to the files, never minding the risk she would get fired, which was exactly what happened next? "Yeah, right," that was my reaction and still is. So many things were wrong about that game that I could not wait to bring it to a finish, just to find out how it ended. I will replay it the day I decide to slit my wrists. Actually, I feel IT has slit them already. But that is different from the feeling I get with today's games, which immediately repel me. It is as if a little invisible brochure of assumptions ships with every one of them, a tiny gospel of ideology, even when it's some survival platformer. The medium is the message so obviously that I feel that any one of them points me to my place: sit there. Like papier-mache pears, they have no taste, they are not headed anywhere. It may be partly because games have so decisively given up on trying to be anything more than entertainment. In the 90s they still stood on their toes to be art - many, anyway, including some of the most entertaining ones. The strategy Red Alert 2 and its expansion pack, Yuri's Revenge, were crazily entertaining, but they did not telepathically beam to would-be buyers "We charge so many dollars for so many minutes of escape."

Yes, yes. The subscription model, downloadable "content" (nothing self-respecting calls itself "content"), all that came along. Commodification more generally. The quality of the game doesn't even have anything to do with it. Before a game is even made today, it is embedded in this system of understandings of what it may be and what it may not be. A few years ago I would think quite a bit about all this. But now that I've understood the reason (the question in the title is more like an exclamation), there is no more use for analysis. I'm left with the fact, the flavor is gone. And the flavor that is not there any more is the same that is missing when I do something completely unrelated to computers and go to a shopping mall. Some time ago they've become boring. They weren't, now they are, it's undeniable. They used to be castles. There was a movie "Mall Rats" back then, and the "Dawn of the Dead," the zombie shootout? Who would even be enchanted enough with them today to stage a scene in one? Yes, yes, standardization, surveillance, hygiene rules, dead-faced workers on those floor-scrubbing hovertanks, what are they called? Not the workers, the devices. The workers are called "I could be anywhere on Earth."

Migration flows, rows of statistics. But what is the takeaway? Unusable. Inedible. Not visitable for anything but a specific reason. And yet nobody seems much bothered by it. Hipsters munch in identical cafes, roll around on skates God has left for them on the pavement. The utterly banal news in New York Times, supposedly one of the better newspapers. Ukraine on the top, for cheesecake recipes scroll below. No flavor whatsoever. The Roe v. Wade news is also boring in the same font. I miss White Wolf Publishing's books. Their tabletop role-playing games from the 90s. Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines was a digital sprout in 2004 - and we are angling back to the subject of computer enter-whatever-everything-tainment! Yes, that's a good game, but I long for the real stuff, the books and the ideas in them. The "this" that is missing was there. Is it gone for ever? Well, I don't see a force on the planet that could budge this mass of humanity to want less security, less precision, less material abundance in exchange for fluff like fantasy or possibilities of spirit.

Edited June 25, 2022 by temnix

[Jarno Mikkola]

1 hour ago, temnix said:

A simple thought once struck me, looking at some fine paperbacks from the 1970s, that before computers, Photoshop automation and clip art, the ability to ACTUALLY draw was the only way a picture could be made.)

Right, so you never heard of the camera obscura then, dated to 500 years before the current conting started. Cause photos have been able to be made before the chemicals were invented for the photograph, they were just drawn with pensil, or equalent, and then painted over with paint, and thus was a new graft made, picture painting. Now, try and draw a picture of the lie that has left you out of that loop for how long, and we can forget about the simple lunacy of what you suggested. And then there was silent movies, and talkies etc.

Now, of course that single point doesn't remove the points you have made here.

[InThePineways]

@Jarno Mikkola He means an image of something that doesn't exist in real life. A camera obscura just projects light from an object into a dark room, it doesn't generate fantasy images of things that don't exist. Before CGI, film also relied on props and drawings to create an illusion of something unreal. His point stands: Before digital tech, to create an image of something truly unreal you would have to draw it.

 

Edited June 26, 2022 by InThePineways

[Jarno Mikkola]

10 hours ago, InThePineways said:

@Jarno Mikkola He means an image of something that doesn't exist in real life. A camera obscura just projects light from an object into a dark room, it doesn't generate fantasy images of things that don't exist. Before CGI, film also relied on props and drawings to create an illusion of something unreal. His point stands: Before digital tech, to create an image of something truly unreal you would have to draw it.

Right. As it happens, the CO can be made to show you unreal things. Like say ghost pictures. This was a hit in the 1920's.

[temnix]

How nice this has sorted itself out.

[InThePineways]

@Jarno Mikkola Are you talking about pictures like this one? First, that wasn't the camera obscura. Second, it's two pictures of real objects overlaid using double exposure, so my point stands.

Edited June 27, 2022 by InThePineways

[Guest Morgoth]

It's very simple. We are not the target anymore. They have to cater a plethora of people, while before gaming was a thing meant for nerds by nerds. It even had stigma associated with it.

[The_Baffled_King]

6 hours ago, Guest Morgoth said:

We are not the target anymore. They have to cater a plethora of people, while before gaming was a thing meant for nerds by nerds. It even had stigma associated with it.

+1000 internets.

6 hours ago, Guest Morgoth said:

It's very simple.

-5 internets (if the OP thesis that "games from the 90s ... had something that today's games don't" is correct, I'm sure there are many contributing factors)

I really don't want to get into this debate, so I won't even say whether or not I agree with the OP thesis, but I'm sure you deserved many internets for your post.

[Daulmakan]

I think it's a mix of things, really. Even today's VERY VERY few good games won't give you the satisfaction that the classics you played when you were younger did, because that was a carefreer (sp?) time. Then, as Morgoth said, games became too succesful (as in, reached a truly massive audience), and thus are subject to the same generic palette that every genre of entertainment these days is subject to (you could've perfectly made a thread on why nowadays movies/music sucks and it would be the exact same thing). Finally, there's a generational divide between content makers of the past and current ones. Way back, most good games had issues and stuff they wanted to say, now you can be done with that in a second in the social network of your choice, why go through the trouble to make a compelling game around it? Also, the same way most entertainment content gets amalgamated, so are its creators, AKA the people in charge of making games. Not only they won't make innovative, provoking games as the classics were, but they couldn't even if they wanted to, because they have no notable life experiences to draw from, practically all of them having grown on the same rehashed, standarized content. And older HoFers devs aren't the solution either, they're at a point in their lives that they're either jaded or much too busy with other things to deal with making a videogame (assuming they still have something meaningful to say, which isn't likely).

To not end on such a sour note, good news is that the amount of good games is still staggering, so you can always replay those regardless if today's products are mostly crap. And every once in a while, stars will align and something new and pretty decent will come along.

 

[Thacobell]

Nostalgia. Its nostalgia.

[temnix]

Daulmakan, you are right about the changes in games, but the real change has been with the society that makes the games. It has lost its appetite for freedom - and the habit for it. You can write a history of how that came about, a "closing of," but the fact itself is irreducible to anything else. Humans liked to go into open spaces, many of them, often, and now they don't. What difference does it make how the angel's wings were chopped off? What is he supposed to do now? And the problem with the proposition to play old games or watch old movies or listen to old music, all of which I do, is that, in a word, I know how they will end. There are wonderful treasures there, but I know what's ahead of those people and tendencies, where they are leading - here. If I settle in the past, I'm asking for a Hedgehog Day loop, nothing else, because as much as I would like to retreat to an acceptable point on the road and take a side turn, all I can tear away in that new direction is myself. My inner world can break into a different future, my dreams develop - but nothing else. Sometimes on tape I encounter a character played with such truth by a long-gone actor that I say "Yes, yes! This one deserves to live on!" But the character dies, credits roll on, and the character is usually a villain, so a minor figure, a grotesque. History is written by the winners in smooth suits, even if they despise themselves and their cardboard world.

Christians have something to go on that, they believe, will take them out of this circle. They are the only ones with a different message. But I don't think the problem is with reality, it's with humanity.

[temnix]

Morgoth, do you remember how you prepared music files for "The Demon and the Dragon"? Cutting them up? I've got another tune, if you are up for it. This time for "Kings of Vagabonds," the last mod.

[Guest Morgoth]

Yes, I remember. But I remember also that you left the work incomplete and that my work was wasted (I have to thank you for not putting into the bin at least the work done for the silver dragon). I don't care spending minutes or hours to help people, but you have to:
1) deliver
2) be at least kind

Given that you said that you didn't want my feedback , why would you want my help? 

Just for context, my brashness comes from the fact that after I criticized some items made by Temnix in one of his mod (I don't think the mod was released either, but I cannot remember), Temnix told that I was to obey and not to offer feedback.
By the way, if you are curious about my feedback, I told him I found inapproprite the real life references in the description of the items he was making: for example,  I still remember (Even if it was 2 years ago) a Xzibit reference - why would you insert this kind of stuff into the description of an item? That takes you out of the game. 

I'm bored, bye