Most of the hate I see comes from two major directions: As reaction to odious business practice from the bigger gaming companies -- who are all too often run by people who know business but
don't know games, its culture, or its various quirks, and thus unsurprisingly alienate a great deal of people who self-identify as 'gamers' instead of just playing games from time to time -- and as hardcore (TVTropes Warning!)
nostalgia filter.
The first I understand wholeheartedly, though both sides of the conflict are pretty easy to see. The second... I'unno, it starts to irk me. Games of the past aren't really better than games now. In most cases (take it genre by genre), more recent games are categorically
better -- oft times in every bloody way, not just in an overall sense -- than their predecessors. It's incredibly hard to make a case that, as an example, C&C (the first one) is better than Dawn of War -- at least not without indulging in willful self-deception. Age of Wonders stacks up and stands tall among Masters of Magic, HoMM, and its ilk. There's examples in every genre, of the greats of now at the
very least matching the games that came before them. Sit a person who's never played a game (plenty of third world folks starving while we indulge in our luxuries! There's a good sample size to be had.) in front of the best of a genre in the 80s or 90s and the best of the 00s and 10s, and I'd be bloody willing to lay money (though not much, I'm not exactly well off
) that the newer ones come out on top.
Not just pulling that out of my arse. I play old games constantly and I love the hell out of them. The greats of video game history are
greats. I also, when budget or mooching allows, fire up a new game and, yanno'? If you compare then and now, actually stack a particular old game versus its descendant, you're pretty much guaranteed to find that, point for point, the descendant's won out. Maybe it loses on one or two points, that happens between the greats of their own eras, but in an overall sense, video game design has
improved as time has passed. It's still working out its kinks, it's still got problems, and a lot of those improvements have come about simply due to hardware limitations being lifted and plain ol' experience (and shameless idea theft,
always a good thing), but overall, the state of the gaming world's better now than it was 20 years ago. I know, and I think most other folks that have actually been playing that long (and longer!) know it too, they're just letting comparatively minor gripes get in the way of the whole picture -- letting a few dead trees spoil their appreciation of the whole forest, and all that rot.
Games have improved more than they've regressed. Overall, things are improving, if roughly and with difficulty. The greats are getting greater, if sometimes harder to see among all the white noise (which has been true forever and ever and ever
) and the mediocre are getting less mediocre. The crap is still crap. The industry's maturing and changing. It'll be a while before we see exactly how it turns out.
[/nostalgia rant]
