Gaming as an adult is quite different than when I was a teen. There was a post I saw on Reddit that contrasted 3 quantities - time, money, and energy. As a teen I had tons of time and energy, but not as much money as I would have liked. Now I have more money but far less time (apparently there’s a stage when I’m older where I’ll have time and money, but no energy). I have a lot more responsibilities and obligations that take away time from what I would most likely spend the majority of my time doing. I have to maintain cars/house, give attention to the wife, help kids with homework, do household chores like cooking/dishes, stay at work more hours than I used to spend in school as a student, etc. I also have some new hobbies like Photoshop, new time wasters like YouTube/Reddit, and there are a lot of movies/shows that I still want to watch. On the other hand, there are other things that I don’t do as much anymore - like scouts, church, drawing, comics, etc.
I think part of it comes from the fact that we had fewer options back when I was a kid - you got what you got for Christmas/birthdays and even if it was mediocre you played it because that’s all you had (we’re treading dangerously close to an “walking uphill both ways in snow” story). Yeah, we could rent games from the video store here and there to mix things up, and there was also trading games with friends (temporarily), but whenever we sat down to play something we didn’t have the myriad of options that players do today. Now we have 3 major consoles and a very robust PC-gaming crowd in an industry that rivals Hollywood in terms of sales, with new options always in the works, and all with online access to dozens, if not hundreds more games than we had back then. I have more games in just the Nintendo Switch Online catalog than I ever did with physical copies, even after my brothers bought a bunch of games that the video store was dumping for cheap. And if I ever don’t feel like playing what I have, I can find a new game that looks promising to download under $10 within minutes.
Back then it was also easier to keep up on all of the good games and major releases because there were fewer developers and fewer “can’t miss” games overall - most of which could be played on one console. Gaming journalism was in its infancy and so there was only really Electronic Gaming Monthly, Game Pro, and Nintendo Power that were popular, and having a copy of one of those publications kept you in the loop (for the most part). I suppose much of this feeling is a variety of FOMO - Fear Of Missing Out - on a lot of games that I hear about but don't ever get around to trying, let alone finishing.
It is interesting to note that part of what drove games to be the way they were was purely because of economic factors, and not just technology. Games had to be profitable, so a game that could be played for 45 minutes on a single quarter would not be popular with arcade owners, and games that ended after 15 seconds would not be popular with players. Thus things like lives, continues (i.e., +25 cents), and timers were worked into how games worked.
Certain other new conventions arose because of unique hardware (such as many Nintendo multiplayer games not allowing Player 2 to pause because on the original Famicom controller 2 there was a microphone instead of buttons), or other hardware limitations (like combining up plus A to use a dagger on Castlevania because there wasn’t a third button to assign sub-weapons to). Another non-gaming example is that the “save” icon in computer programs is still a floppy disk, but we haven’t used those in 24 years really. Kids these days just learn what the picture for it is without understanding why, usually. Other gaming conventions were developed over the years, such as auto-saving and health regeneration, but to a certain extent it also has the effect of making people less “responsible” in the same way that automatic headlights off make people less responsible over time because they never suffer the consequences of a dead battery.
It was common in the 80's and early 90's to have games/systems release in the US a year behind the Japanese schedule because companies didn't have the mass localization capabilities that they have now (this is also true of a lot of things, like movies, these days). Most things are released in multiple markets within a week of each other now.
Something else I’ve noticed that has changed over the years is that games used to have cryptic hints that were hard to decipher, pixelated sprites that are difficult to discern what they are supposed to represent, and any semblance of a story was mostly contained in the instruction manual or a single screen of text. These days there is enough memory to have full sentences/paragraphs as hints that make sense, graphics are good enough to easily ascertain what objects are, and the story (including dialogue and cutscenes) is contained entirely within the game itself; in fact, it’s pretty rare to see an instruction manual at all because of the ubiquity and higher quality of in-game tutorials.
On a similar note, it's interesting that the original purpose of music in an arcade game was to call attention to itself during the title screen to entice players to play by essentially advertising that it's not being used. That changed with Koji Kondo and Super Mario Bros./Zelda. But it's also interesting to note that musicians for early games were also programmers. David Wise spent months encoding all the necessary elements to make the incredible soundtracks to the Donkey Kong Country series. But now, the composers are just normal composers in the same way that movies have composers, since now the music can just be played/recorded by an orchestra and inserted into games as is without programming beeps and boops.
However, one thing that has changed very slowly is the depictions of games/gamers on TV shows and movies. Ever since the 80’s, whenever a kid is depicted playing games they have some random joystick or generic controller, and they’re going to town mashing the buttons like it’s some kind of contest while waving the controller around, meanwhile sound effects from the terrible Atari port of Pac-Man are playing in the background. I don’t know if it’s laziness/procrastination on the part of the sound guys or the producers or what, but it’s only been the last few years that it’s been portrayed more accurately. Even a movie that was centered around games (The Wizard) had pre-recorded videos playing, but at least they had the right sound effects/music (even if the audio didn’t match the video shown on screen).
But now that it’s much less of a niche hobby/industry, there is more to play and more news to keep up on, which is both good and bad. There are times when I feel like I’m kinda out of the loop, stuck over here in Nintendo-land (the hypothetical concept, not the Wii U game) and 15 years behind the times. I hear of popular AAA games that either don’t interest me or I just don’t have the time/money to spend on something I’m not sure I’ll like ahead of time. Perhaps it’s that I’ve just learned what I like and I shouldn’t feel bad for not trying out all of these games, or it could be that I’m just getting more deeply set in my ways.
What I have been doing more recently, though, is turning 10 pm to Midnight into my own personal 2 hours of games (usually). Ever since the N64, I’ve tended to find 5-8 games that have good replayability and not branch out much beyond them. But with the Switch I’ve played a lot more Indy, retro, and smaller games because of the ease of availability digitally and keeping up on when things go on sale. That said, I now have a library of games that I’ll probably never play again, but I suppose at some point all games will be played for the last time.
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