Screw Nostalgia: Why Gaming is Better Now

[Cyberpunk]

Just a post I found online at Unreality Mag that I thought I'd share, just as a talking point. Originally published by Paul Tassi.

I almost fell into another blogging trap where I was tempted to write about how good games used to be, and how things have changed for the worse now. The whole Mass Effect 3 ending debacle was torn open as a fresh wound when Bioware released the “extended cut” DLC yesterday, and now when we’re getting “proper” endings as downloadable content, I can’t help but thinking we’re moving in the wrong direction.

But it’s not fair to dismiss the progress of an entire industry because of Starchildren or the fact that I can’t play any good local multiplayer games any more. The fact is, the industry has come a long way from when we were kids, and it would be good to remember that. That’s what this post aims to do.

I’m trying to get past all the negativity that surrounds gaming these days so we can remember why we have so much fun with them in this day and age. Possibly more than we even used to. Read on to see how gaming’s gotten better.

These Worlds are Almost Real Now

The first and most obvious thing to address is how games have evolved graphically over the past two decades. When I was born in 1987, Final Fantasy games looked like this:

Today we have this:

The same could be said for countless other series as well, as many of them are still around today. Whether it’s humans that almost look photorealistic in games like Heavy Rain or LA Noire, or environments that couldn’t seem more real and expansive like Skyrim and Just Cause, games can now give us an immersive experience that past consoles simply couldn’t. We had to use our imaginations to make the pixels epic before, but now games are richer than anything we could envision in our own minds.

No more blowing

Hardware has evolved to the point where it’s no longer a gamble whether or not a system will work when you turn it on or not. It seemed like every other time I wanted to play a game, I was blowing in a console cartridge, but now, we can pop in almost any disc and it will work without hesitation.

The obvious exception to the rule would be the fact that every single Xbox 360 will self-destruct at one time or another, and there are some ancient Game Boys that work even after being exploded by bombs. We may have more consistency now, but I think old systems do win for pure durability.

Multiplayer know no borders

As much as I lament the fact that there are very few games these days that I can play with three other friends who happen to be in the same room with me, multiplayer has expanded in ways that allow old friends to stay in touch, no matter where they are in the world.

As we grow older and not everyone lives in the same neighborhood anymore, it can be hard to keep in touch. And which would you rather do? Write on somebody’s Facebook wall or spend an hour blasting Russians in Call of Duty? Online multiplayer may have brought us screaming twelve year olds in our ears, but it’s also kept old friends together as we grow older and our lives expand outward across the country

There are these things called plots

With greater graphics come greater storytelling experiences. It’s hard to name a game that’s more than ten years old that had a truly compelling plot. What’s your favorite video game story from the ’80s or ’90s. The President who was kidnapped by ninjas? The battling toads with a death wish? The hundreds of protagonists who wanted to save hundreds of princesses?

Today we have actual stories to our games, and ones can be as compelling as anything we see in TV or film. Red Dead Redemption, Bioshock or Mass Effect (most of the time), have all delivered truly memorable experiences in a way that doesn’t solely rely on gameplay alone. It’s the stories that have captivated us, and it’s why video game characters are now more than simple mascots. Mario and Sonic are logos, Commander Shepard and John Marston are heroes.

Gaming is no longer for little boys

The truth is, if you were an avid gamer twenty or thirty years ago, it was most likely the case you were a young boy, and your parents had never touched a console themselves. It was an activity primarily dominated by children or young teens, and was the geekiest of geeky past times. Yes, girls played games, but in far, far fewer numbers than boys overall.

Now, things are different. Little girls are growing up with games nearly as much as boys are. And their parents? They’re gamers too. We’ve now learned that gaming is not a “phase” you have to grow out of. Rather, it’s shaping up to be a lifelong past time the way watching movies or reading books is. As such, it’s no longer this nerdy, dorky or geeky activity relegated to a certain age group or gender. In 2012, everyone is gaming, and that’s something you couldn’t say in the whimsical time of yesteryear.

Things will only get better

Few things get me more excited than anticipating all the great pieces of pop culture I haven’t experienced yet. All the great movies or shows I have yet to watch, but more pressingly, all the fantastic games I haven’t gotten to play. Each new console generation drives the industry forward to an even greater degree, and it’s downright impossible to predict what gaming will look like ten, twenty or thirty years from now. I bet gamers then will be waxing poetic for the simpler time of Xbox 360 and PS3, but they’ll probably have some pretty kickass games as well. And I can’t wait to play them.

(Cyberpunk writing here now)

On a personal note, as someone who's been gaming since the very early days, it is so much easier to be a gamer now. Mr Tassi above points out that you had to blow on the cartridge to get it to work, but this was the least of gaming problems. Go back a bit further, and you have games on cassette, which only loaded if it was sunny, 20 degrees, and you didn't touch the speccy/C64 while it did it's thing. Or back further again to the early days of Atari, when their 2600 console actually had very few microchips inside it, or the cartridges, as it was cheaper to hardwire the circuits onto circuit boards.

Early 90's pc gaming usually involved making a custom boot floppy disc, so you could run your game in MS-DOS. And woe betide the man who forgot his sound card drivers on the floppy disc. I actually got really good at making boot floppys for games, with a fine balance between graphics driver, sound driver, and the minuscule amount of base RAM.

Retro gaming is a big thing at the mo, and I do love the retro titles that come out on various platforms. But lets not forget that the hard stuff has been done already. The emulators on the Wii Virtual Console work a treat. ANd the HD remakes give you the game as you remember it, not as it was.

To close, I love modern gaming. And I love the ease of it all. DLC has been mastered, consoles are reliable, hand held consoles look great, and PC gaming is no longer for the faint hearted. I'll probably still play a run through of Sonic the Hedgehog, and Mario All Stars every now and again though.

[HandsomeDead]

I have so many issues with this but I'll tackle them tonight as I'm heading out. I think gaming is better now, but not because of any of these reasons.

[DANGERMAN]

I think he's probably right, although you could probably argue that characterisation was better in the 90s than it is now. And to touch on plots too, most game plots are still shit, and some of the better ones I've played in recent years were Dragon Quest 5 and Chrono Trigger

Maybe that's the other thing, everything has a story now, even puzzle games. I'm not sure a lot of fps games need a plot more detailed than Doom's 'monsters from Hell, kill them', even Dirt Showdown had a narrative stuck on and it's just a series of races

[Cyberpunk]

I know the guy is flawed in what he says. And I personally love a bit of retro. My point at the end was to try to convey how easy gaming is now. Even my wife games on her phone and Tablet. I like old games, but not the hoops we used to have to jump through in order to play.

[TopGunKnacker]

I think game design is better now. the bar in general is higher. It seems to me currently almost the only time you get a bad game is when its half baked like a movie tie-in that got a year to be made. we know a whole lote more about what makes games tick now, you can do a university course in game design!

it helps that personally i think more modern, perhaps western genres like fps that have come on leaps and bounds in the last 3 gens are absolutely fantastic. no two ways about it for me, cod4 pisses on probotector! and i love probotector!

[HandsomeDead]

Okay I'll just get this out of the way.

The first point about how games are almost real now; I don't think that alone is better. I may be nit picking but I think a better term is more graphical styles are open now. As I said in the other thread, I like pixel art in games so I don't look at a photo-realistic game and become more impressed with it. I like that we have the scope to make a game look like we want, but that type of style isn't inherently better. While Final Fantasy II or whatever that is doesn't look advanced the pixel art in Final Fantasy VI or Chrono Trigger look fantastic.

Now the plots thing; that's a big one. Now, generally speaking I like Red Dead Redemption but the plot in that game almost exists on its own, away from the game. And while those are some of the finer examples of stories in games there is an absolute glut of shit, too, much like the 90s.

And when I read that I instantly thought of the whole Tomb Raider thing again. They're adding a story and it's not always for the best. The original had a story in a way, well it was more of a context or a scenario and you played within it but will adding a more cinematic kind of narrative make it better? Time will tell but I'm unconvinced, but I don't think game writers are good enough to do more advanced storytelling beyond scenario creation. So they could be better in the future, but as they are now? no, stories aren't better; they strive to be more than quirky scenarios but end up falling flat.

Oh, and I missed the games were just for boys thing, which is just absolute bullshit. Yes, there was a time in the 90s when gaming was aimed at young boys and teenagers but from personal experience back then I knew much more girls that play games than now. I mean Pacman for God sake! That game is famous for bringing girls into the gaming fold back then and they even made the sequel Ms. Pacman acknowledging it. There were loads of text adventures on early consoles that were not aimed at children at all, but adults. And I just don't know as many girls that game now. Yeah, I guess they play 'casual' games and that but mainstream console games aren't as open as they used to be.

I think we have it great now in how varied games can be these days. he have the biggest AAA games ever and bedroom game designers can also do their thing but sometimes you gotta give games a kicking. It's for the best!

[Cyberpunk]

Nice comeback Mr Class. I agree.

[HandsomeDead]

I like being validated!

But seriously, I think what I failed to say is we have so much freedom now with how games can be played, how we buy them and what they look like and play like but these freedoms really aren't being properly embraced, especially by the AAA games market.

[Sly Reflex]

These Worlds are Almost Real Now

The worlds have almost been real to me for a long long time now. Even playing Grannies Garden back on the BBC in school I was totally absorbed. I kind of get where he is coming from though. When you are in an Elder Scrolls game or WoW or whatever, even though it is high fantasy it is totally believable. When I was playing WoW I played through a major update (Cata), and watching how the world changed and how everything reacted to it was kind of amazing. You truly believed that this catastrophic thing had happened and ruined the world. You started getting all these encampments and stuff popping up all over the place. While I was playing it felt absolutely real like I was actually visiting Kalimdor and all the devastation it had had done to it.

Again, Gears is another high fantasy shlock that goes the other way into future soldiers fighting monsters. At first it was just about meaty men butchering monsters in gruesome ways, but when you look deeper you see that the people who have created it really have put in a lot of effort. It's easy to say "Put a chainsaw on it!", but it it's out the realms of reality then it's really hard to believe. In the situation we fight wars now that gun would totally have no purpose, but if we were to fight on the same face to face terms as what the characters in GoW do, It'd be a logical step to put some sort of bayonet on the gun that could cause a lot of damage to the enemy. When you look at other weapons like the Torque Bow as conceptual ideas, something like that could be created in reality. It probably wouldn't be much use in a hostile situation, but as a physical contraption something like that could actually exist.

No more blowing

So we no longer have to blow on cart and watch tape loads fail? Great. What about all the other factors that have replaced those? Scratched discs. Corrupt HDD's. Connections dropping. NAT settings being a bitch. Communities for older games dying. Servers getting turned off. Games getting delisted. There are still a lot of problems. They've just replaced the ones that we don't have to put up with now.

Multiplayer know no borders

This is one of the reasons gaming shines right now. I can play with like minded people like you guys. Not that my friends don't play games, almost all of them do, but they are not as dedicated as 80% of the people on my friendlist, who I know if I say "I want to play this, you down?" that almost all of the time I'll have some people to play with. I can no longer spend hours on end with people sat at my side playing games. Life isn't like that any more. Admittedly, local isn't dead, but it's a very minor part of my game time now.

There are these things called plots

Most of the plots are terrible though. I'm mainly playing 2 games at the moment. Minecraft. The only plot is the objective of the game. Build a shelter, survive the night. The other game is Heroes of Ruin and it throws that out like a self referencing B movie. Out of all the games that have stories only a handful of them are exceptional. I'm not saying every game should be some sort of movement that needs to make us all think, simply because having a story akin to Shindlers List or My Left Foot would be stifling. You need the light hearted stuff. Bulletstorm is a fine example of that. It knows it's not high brow. It knows what it's targeting and it does it well. As long as the story is entertaining I don't see a problem with it, even if it is a bad story.

Gaming is no longer for little boys

It's still massively male dominated though in certain areas. Approximate guesses come in at a 40/60 split which the most observant of you will notice is quite near balanced. So why out of the 91 people I have on my xbox friend list do I only have 5 women? Shouldn't that be more in the region of 30 odd women if those figures are correct? I guess you could make jokes about me scaring women away with the vulgar/sexist etc, but before you say that you need to go and look at your friend list on any of the main systems and count the population of the ladies. There was a high population of women playing WoW but not enough to show that 4 in every 10 I met were women. I presume the others are playing flash games and throw away shite on mobile phones. This might come off across as massive elitism, but to me that's not gaming. Gaming is owning a device specifically for playing games. Playing stuff like Words with Friends, Angry Birds or even Freecell on a PC doesn't make you a gamer. That's like saying I know everything about football because I wore a football shirt once. To be a gamer you must buy or have access to something that is dedicated to playing games, or chose a purchase that will allow you to play the games you want.

Still, as a media it has done a lot of growing up since Nintendo, SEGA and cheap portable TV's consigned it to the kids bedroom. It started off in pubs and clubs where the main audience was adults, moved under the main tv in the house under the guise of an Atari, again where the audience was adults, moved onto family then relegated itself to a kids market, effectively painting itself in a corner. It wasn't until Sony noticed that they could self a fuck load of systems by switching back to the mature adult market that we got to where we are today. It's the solution company should make really, as kids see adult things as cool items anyway, it's rarely works the other way around. Unless you count LEGO. LEGO will always be awesome.

Things will only get better

I think it will. As TGK says, the only really bad games we get now are the cash cow games. As much as I dislike the CoD franchise, it's not a bad game. Hell, as much as I dislike Battlefield 3, I don't think it's a bad game. I just think as a whole it's a bad Battlefield game from what I've experienced of Battlefield. As much as we moan and complain about current games and all their inadequacies, how many of us play retro games on a regular basis? How many times do you play something that is obscure if you do? We all know stuff like Sonic and Mario games have aged well, but would you ever choose to go back and play something you never heard of and come back and say it's great? As much as I loved certain games back then, there is absolutely no way I would trade them in now for what I had then. For all the shit we put up with now, we've never had it so good.

To close, I love modern gaming. And I love the ease of it all. DLC has been mastered, consoles are reliable, hand held consoles look great, and PC gaming is no longer for the faint hearted. I'll probably still play a run through of Sonic the Hedgehog, and Mario All Stars every now and again though.

I'll agree with all your points apart from the DLC being mastered. In some cases it's the backbone of some titles, keeping them fresh and making players go back even when they had through they had done everything. In other cases it's nothing but unscrupulous scalping of monies for stuff that should have been in the game since day one. I fully understand that the people responsible for the games need to be paid, but for certain things they are taking the piss. I'm of the mind that vanity items are all well and good when the game you are playing is free or very very cheap, but when you lay your sterling down for entry, there shouldn't be extra expense to buy shit that should unlock with the progression of the game.

Yeah, I had the ramble-o-matic on there. When you start chucking topics about like this it is bound to happen.

[radiofloyd]

I'm playing old games all the time, and most of them for the first time. So if you ever see me draw up a list of my favourite games and it features a lot of old games, nostalgia will have nothing to do with it.

At the moment i'm playing Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge which is an excellent game - and ironically i'm playing it in classic mode because the original graphics are still great (full of character, and evocative) - and the revamped "special edition" graphics look terrible.

Gaming evolves with every generation. And every generation there are old fashioned games and games at the cutting edge. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, and that doesn't depend solely on anything.

I'd be happy enough to accept the general statement that gaming is better now, based simply on the number of games i buy, or want to buy each year. The rising costs of game development seems to have dragged up the quality of games in general, AAA games anyway. Or maybe developers are just older and wiser.

[OCH]

My only negative in comparing modern gaming to retro is its played too safe and by the numbers (money-wise) today. True some still push the envelope but not as many as yesteryear. Even the current indie games coming out tend to stick to only one or two genres. There was a time when even the big Devs took pride in making games such as Snake, Rattle & Roll, Tobal No.1 even Rolo To The bloody Rescue. Now its more about the money then ever before.

[RYAN WHITELAW]

The original author kinda annoyed me early on when he said he was born in 1987. So when did he actually start gaming and giving games a decent bit of attention to actually appreciate them?