This is a fantastic thread and well worth reading. I should keep up with the forums more. 
I watched this last night. its worth sharing here. It really makes me think and i thought it was worth watching:
He makes some interesting points about the evolution of the Elder Scrolls, but no doubt this is relevant to the evolution of the fallout franchise as well. Especially concerning some very consistent criticisms of F4 (Haven’t played myself, just briefly read opinionated conclusions on it)
I like old and new games and do not discriminate on age or aesthetic, but i find these days i just am not willing to accept a good challenge and prefer to cheat rather than try or ‘work for it’. According to this video i am more like the spoiled youngster in that regard. (I would think @Torgo is maybe the guy that made the video, but there is no australian accent. lol)
However, young generation gamers and old generation still look for exploits and play with the system. I read the funniest thing the other day on reddit someone (i’m just going to guess this was a child) had collected a ton of loot in skyrim and just threw it on the floor in their house. Then they made a big pile of it and eventually it would cause gameplay and ultimately stability issues. just google image ‘skyrim hoarders’ and you will see lots of people doing this. it never occured to me to keep stuff outside of containers. Can you imagine a pile of junk so big you can’t leave the house ? I never even imagined doing that…
Said gamer then tried to ‘fix’ his problem in an equally interesting way. he would take trips down to the local lake/pond and dump the junk in the water. Apparently this landfill somehow corrupted the game at some point. It almost sounds like your typical internet fake story but i can believe this being a game breaking activity in a static cell (or before cell refresh occurs) water physics added to the mix could do it too, everyone and their dog knows how janky havok is. geez! I have to give this story the benefit of the doubt
I think looking for exploits is one of the more common threads that might unite us all. But geez do they take different forms and interpretations across generations and genres: Whether it is an old school gamer who is literally looking for any way out of some impossible problem in a very merciless RPG that doesnt accept mistakes (as is described in that video) or a Dark Souls player looking to exploit a boss, or a casual gamer looking to exploit another player in COD, or a kid trying to protect his house from the creepers or just trying to figure out a way to clean up their room in Skyrim by dumping their loot in the lake. Or a damn cheater such as myself. We are all trying to figure something out.
I didnt really realize how much the years have changed me and my sense of what a game is or should be until i watched that video. I imagine a lot of people are like me and are currently also these weird hybrids now as well who now either arent interested, aren’t willing or cant afford to commit the time to the kinds of things they did when they were kids when they would toil for weeks on a game like Shadowgate, Dragon Warrior, Metroid, Torment, Wizardry, and ultimately win and feel an immense sense of satisfaction or find some kind of an exploit in some way or another that was equally exhilrating, maybe the thrill of not even knowing what the exploit was. Imagine button mashing in frustration only to unknowinlgy unlock the konami code, or plugging in gibberish throug hthe game genie in hopes of getting something good… This is more or less how cheats were discovered. lol Are these old experiences that are essentially lost forever? should they be revisited and new gamers have to walk 40 miles through snow in the morning etc. to somehow feel a reward for the effort? even if it’s finding cheats rather than scanning memory for things to exploit or googling it? lol
Indeed game genie is a good subject. For the most part i’d blatantly cheat (and still do with cheat engine) but i’d also try to discover stuff, plugging in random letters hoping for something. usually that wouldnt work, But oh the exhilration when it did work. Sometimes you’d have something and not know what, or sometimes it would be a blessing and a curse. and of course i was not really able to figure out how to alter things or test things scientifically. people still do this, but in new contexts. but these days we ban them from steam like Heretics. especially if they succeed lol.
Now having said all this. How’d minecraft get so popular with kids? From what I gather is seems like the most popular game kids play online (or was anyway) along with runequest! Neither of those games are power fantasy really and they are rather tedious and IMO pretty hard and have some very frustrating moments. I found minecraft Very engrossing is that enough to win a young audience over? Maybe that can be enough to just win anyone.
that’s another though about this general idea of old games beating new ones. you had smaller production studios back then and for the most part there was totally not a lot of business in it. if you made anything at all then god bless you. my understanding is people who made the game were doing it for fun. DOOM certainly wasn’t planned (my interpretetation is you would see someone who made a game as literally the dungeon masters and they enjoyed toying with whoever might play what they were making and get off on it in a pseudo-sadistic way) another aspect of this was that these small production studios (especially if it was ONE person like the guy who did Another World) you’d have a very strong, consistent and spirited vision. Basically art. That kind of thing that can inspire anyone including someone young. This isnt so common now, even with good games that are well done and the designers themselves actually play their own games themselves, to make sure they are fun that seems to be as good as it gets and the most one can hope for is something fun. I find the inspirational element is a bit rare now. and you certianly dont see a unity of vision of a huge AAA studio that ads tons of content all over the place and tries to string it together. (There is no better example to mock than bethesda with their all around jankiness in everything from inconsistent and out of context dialogue and NPC behavior to lore that isnt even compatible among itself if you dig deep enough) Due to technical limitations the means to express onself were also fairly limited. So to play a game and feel immersion in it you were really deep into whatever this designer did and took in every detail. I think the way games are made in this sense is far greater than the aesthetic impressions it makes. I also think that this is why some of us love 16 bit games so much. With the 16 bit style of sprite art we had the perfect means to express. We even had voice synthesis. Compare that to 8 bit art and there is still some abstraction and limitiations that (maybe it is personal) limits expression, but the 16 bit capabilities of those systems allow for pretty much anything, if you have a vision or a voice.
Let’s take a look at hotline miami. It has the retro aesthetic sure, but it is also a very simplistic game. However, it was prettty immersive to me as I played it despite a (lets be honest) somewhat cheesy story and very reptitive mechanical arcade play. But in playing it, one can’t help but become attuned to every detail in order to survive. so the less is more thing can really work well in this regard, and if the designer actually is an artist or has a vision then that is a compatible vechicle for expression even if the message is a bit hokey or cobbled. Another memorable game for me was Phantasy Star IV. The cutscenes and video effects really did woo me, it had a run of the mill JRPG story but the presentation was a top notch thanks to that 16 bit art, the game itself is also simplistic and that kind of trance-like repeittion common to the JRPG in this era. (I seem to like my JRPGs where i really just zone out into like that.)
For the time being I am agreeing with torgo that indie devs make better games hands down than big studios, but that’s because you simply cant have a huge vision without these damn hiccups. I love bethesda and what they do (except horse armor for 5 bucks) but there is a huge difference that inevitably come out in any big project versus something small and you can hear it in music too. the historical context of art in games might largely be lost but that doesnt mean games cant be fun or even that games cant be good. It also doesnt mean that there is reason to feel guilty for playing these games that are fun but are not really art, lol. Maybe the AAA thing will die down at some point, at least become more managed to have smaller teams working on more consistent bits. I Dont think the AAA vehicle is a downward spiral where mixed media goes the way of Zalgo. Sometimes, but not always.