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  • I mean, they can still play the old games. My kiddo loved Kirby on the NES Classic

    • The point of the meme is the experience of witnessing the unique rate of progress in game engines, not the variety. There's definitely more variety now than ever before, if you go looking for it l, and I say that as a 40 year old curmudgeon.

      • Exactly. Several limits were loosened or removed entirely. The SNES was the first console with actual pixel transparency, the PSX, despite being weaker than the Saturn and the N64, was the king of the 90s. The jump in graphical and sound quality was always night and day from the Atari era all the way to the PS3/360 era (sound probably peaked in the PS2 era, with DVD quality)

        Even on the PC, the jump from 3 years' worth of advances was astonishing. Just compare the original Doom, 1993, with Quake, 1996

        And here's Quake 3, 1999

    • Not the most active current popular games for them tho, if you're around 18 rnow fortnite was prob the main/only mutiplayer title played, my friends and I played a ton of games, jumping every month to what was popular, its consistently been fortnite for kids for a while now, I have 18 year old nephews that have only ever played fortnite, which is honestly a non issue if that works for them, the goal is to get dopamine, move on when you stop getting dopamine

      They can play the same game for years and I cant even open one of hundreds I have avilable to me most days, I think they and sports game player win, they seem happier.

      • the goal is to get dopamine, move on when you stop getting dopamine

        Is that the goal? I want more from my games than just poking my brain. I sometimes play games that challenge my reactions, sometimes ones that challenge my thinking. Superhot and Braid provided interesting time-related puzzles. Portal had some good lateral thinking puzzles.

        I'm not exactly playing educational games, but when I played Assassin's Creed games, the historical bits I found interesting were things I could learn more about outside the game. When I played Hearts of Iron 4, it was global politics around the time of WWII. Uboat and other sub games taught me a bit about submarine tactics in WWII. Oxygen not included taught me things I didn't know about thermodynamics and materials, even if it is extremely simplified. Age of Empires and Total War were gateways to learn about medieval styles of warfare.

        Even Sea of Thieves, which involves incredibly simplified sailing was what prompted me to learn about how square-masted sailing ships actually worked.

        And, of course, all the flight simulators I've played over the years has taught me a lot about how to actually fly planes.

        To me, if all you're getting from a game is a bit of dopamine hits, you're really missing out. It's like watching the same movie over and over, or reading the same book over and over.

  • My take from this meme is that Zoomers and later are more "captured" by a few big platforms than previous ones.

    And perhaps earlier ones, too.

    Like, my aunts and relatives are trapped on Facebook sharing Trumpy memes. Kids younger than me seems to be really into ultra-short videos or mobile-ish games. The only people I know that know how to use a desktop PC, beyond the bare minimum for work are… about my age? Other than a senior dev.

    This is a huge generalization and small sample, but still. I'm not worried about other generations doing things I don’t like (that’s always true, and a good thing), I’m worried about them being more trapped.

    • My take from this meme is that Zoomers and later are more “captured” by a few big platforms than previous ones.

      Steam games have been around for a lot longer than 10 years. So has Nintendo. There's no reason a Zoomer wouldn't have played Stardew Valley or Undertale or Mario Odyssey or Wii Tennis.

      Like, my aunts and relatives are trapped on Facebook sharing Trumpy memes. Kids younger than me seems to be really into ultra-short videos or mobile-ish games. The only people I know that know how to use a desktop PC, beyond the bare minimum for work are… about my age?

      I keep seeing this complaint. I'll never understand it. I definitely know family that have mired themselves in Facebook memes. But its silly to pretend my Blessed Lemmy-4chan-channel is materially better than their Barbaric Facebook-4chan-channel. Honestly, just amazed they finally came around on computers at all. So many of my parent's generation couldn't even check email twenty years ago.

      Similarly, the Office Space Millennials seem to have completely forgotten that their non-technical peers exist. Like they've never met an auto mechanic or a plumber or a doctor their age who has struggled with using a computer. I used to do IT for a physicians clinic and it was the Medical Assistants doing all the office work. The RNs and MDs couldn't do shit. Which was ironic, because so much of the IT upgrade was about reducing staff size... but the MAs were the ones who grasped the tech the fastest while the actual medical staff avoided tech like the plague.

      And sure, kids half your age don't know DOS commands because they don't use DOS. But there's no shortage of Zoomer/GenA computer geeks. I ran into a gaggle of robotics club Alphas in downtown, near the local convention center, just last week. Every year my office fills up with interns who built their own PCs and threw up their own home PLEX servers for their parents who are my age.

      Some of you are just so damned cloistered, insisting the three 14 year olds you know aren't doing Angelina Jolie shit from Hackers in their basements before they're even old enough to drive. But pull down your reading glasses, squint a bit, and you'll see plenty of tech savvy folks younger than you.

  • 10 years of being GenX:

    year 1: monochromatic primary-coloured graphics on a ZX Spectrum/chunky sprites on a Commodore 64/dying of dysentery and NTSC colour fringing on an Apple II

    year 10: 4096-colour 3D graphics and digitised sound on an Amiga/playing Microsoft Flight Simulator on a 1024x768 multisync monitor

143 comments