Generation Z’s Reaction to 8 and 16-Bit Gaming

The aesthetics are certainly unique to their era, but I think the core entertainment value is still there. It's like if a kid today preferred 50s or 60s music to today's modern "music". Sure the production of today's modern music may be technically better, but that doesn't mean the composition or craftsmanship necessarily is. In general people are addicted to "newer is always better", which is false logic out the gate. But in a capitalist society that creed is inherently indoctrinated to drive the commerce agenda. Thus by default the average consumer is going to ignorantly see older media as inferior, including retro games. Yourself not falling for that trap is not a failing of your own tastes by any means.


I think you sussed this out fairly well for yourself. It's true that a kid doesn't have to spend a lot of time on one game anymore, especially when they can download new games straight out of the ether for free all day every day. That fact coupled with a holistic decline in default game difficulty en masse begets the less patient modern gamer. Also as most kids play smartphone games these days via simple touch input, having to coordinate multiple button presses to formulate complex movement patterns is a tad beyond their ken. I certainly think any young kid could learn to play hardcore retro games these days, but having the impetus to do so? Not so much. Which is a dire shame IMO. Throwing oneself against a seemingly impossible challenge until its conquered builds character, to say the least.


I believe for some older gamers what you describe acts as a continued subliminal drive. It makes sense that as an adult you're going to want to horde what your parents denied you as a child. However for some of us that isn't quite the case. My parents made no effort to cull my gaming time growing up (the opposite if anything), and yet my taste for gaming and game collection persists into middle age. (My reasons for continuing to game as seriously as I do are varied, and a bit self indulgent to go into here.)


When my daughter was seven I gave her a SNES with a lot of games. She tended to focus on the explicit Mario stuff primarily. She enjoyed them (especially Super Mario World and Mario Paint), but I don't know if she beat any of them. At twenty years old she only plays modern smartphone and PC games now. I never see her emulating anything, despite the fact I setup a bunch of emulators and ROMs on her laptop. Not too long ago I let a young nephew-in-law of mine play some NES games with me. He enjoyed playing them with me (2 player stuff), but afterwards he returned to his tablet. He had no interest in playing NES games by himself.

I think as the years go by, there will always be a small subset of open minded gamers, who will want to explore this medium's past, and enjoy doing so. But by and large modern gamers will only play modern games. That's just as true for the film and music industry though ("newer is better").

You just jogged my memory about something. Around 1997 my mom would listen to an oldies station full of songs from the early 60’s. (I assume my Mom listened to these in the 70’s and 80’s since she wasn’t alive when any of these came out.)





This must have planted seeds in my mind, because late last year I just spontaneously began singing these to myself. It made me want to go rediscover them on YouTube. They’re catchy and fun, so I guess I’d like them even if I had never heard them before. But something about being exposed to these during childhood gives me a sense of significance and belonging. Which is kinda ridiculous since I was born after the Berlin Wall fell. By the same logic, though, I also got my first NES and Sega Genesis in 1995. By that time the former was an antique and the latter was about to go obsolete.



I’m just trying to be introspective enough to avoid the pitfalls of lacking any self-awareness. Let me illustrate with a friend of mine who’s really passionate about Star Wars. This friend is about 5 years younger than me, adores the original trilogy, and has spent close to a few thousand on movie-prop quality lightsaber replicas. He also harbors has a deep-seated hatred of the J.J. Abrams trilogy. He often sends me half-hour long YouTube rants about why Finn, Rey, and Kylo Rent are stupid. The new trilogy isn’t without its flaws, but I thought it was OK. I don’t really get his crusade to prove why The Force Awakens and Last Jedi are trash. Even if they were trash (which I don't believe they are), I've been through this with other cherished series like Sonic, Megaman, and Castlevania. It's not that I'm critical of people who are more passionate than me about Star Wars - I recently attended a promotional event at a comic book store with Star Wars cosplayers. I’d never put together an elaborate costume like that, but I adored the time and energy these fans put into it. I’m equally in awe of Greg Dietrich, who built a life size replica of the Millennium Falcon cockpit:



But this friend of mine can’t seem to talk about anything other than Star Wars. Don’t misconstrue me and think I’m being critical of Star Wars fandom, what I mean is that this guy is a little behind with learning how to relate to people, so he’ll go on and on for hours about stuff that only of interest to himself. I know a few other people like this. I’m actually rather predisposed to it myself, so I feel like I have to be really vigilant to avoid being self-absorbed. What I’ve found most validating about this hobby is when people who aren’t passionate about games see something in my library that reminds them of childhood and they ask to see it, just to take a brief stroll down memory lane. It affirms that this isn’t just some narcissistic pursuit that only appeals to me. For some reason it's important to me to stop and check on that from time to time.



Yeah, I was just surprised since I had been expecting the main cultural barrier to be graphics. I remember in the early 2000’s when 3D graphics started looking really nice, Metal Slug 3 for the XBOX received a mediocre score from a prominent video game magazine because it was 2D. I don’t really think that would happen today. The atmosphere that made Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on Playstation so controversial just hasn’t persisted into 2018. I was just surprised to realize the main difference comes from the overwhelming glut of games to play, not the more advanced technology of those games.

If they wanted to mirror that “You have two televisions?!” scene from Back to the Future 1 in Back to the Future 2, the kids in the 80’s cafe watching Marty play Wild Gunman would probably grin and say, “Wow, that’s cool.” then get bored after 5 minutes and pull out their own pocket devices with thousands of games on them. The games might not even necessarily look any better than Wild Gunman, they’d just have so many to choose from that there’d be no reason to spend hours mastering any one of them.



My parents and grandparents were pretty indulgent. That’s the reason I got a Gameboy, Sega Genesis, N64, and so on. I’m just saying there was a generation gap during the 80’s and 90’s. Perhaps it’s like how some older people have a hard time getting used to computers. Or how older generations abhorred rock n’ roll, but now it’s completely mainstream. This caused some contention from time to time, even with my elders who enjoyed doting on me and my siblings.



My friend's son was the same way. I think he enjoyed Mario 64 and Mario World more because it was an activity he and I were doing together. But I think he just did it to interact with me, not because he likes SNES or N64. Then again, I remember being intensely interested in games as early as age 5. For instance I would watch my Dad play Doom on his computer then try to draw pictures of it at school. I would doodle Vectroman and Lemmings in my notebooks and pretend I was in the middle of House of the Dead and Zelda: Ocarina of Time while playing outside. It just consumed a lot of my time and interest. Maybe it’s like how I taught myself so much Japanese because I find it inherently fun to spend hours cataloging and memorizing so many grammar, vocabulary, and cultural rules. Most people find that torturous. Even in the 90’s I had friends who liked video games but weren’t quite passionate about them like I was. That probably comes down to individual taste more than a generation gap.



For me, I’d like to believe this preoccupation with the past fits in the context of historical interest, of wanting to understand how things were. There’s this part in the CNN documentary series “The 60’s” where Tom Hanks describes how exciting color television felt when he first saw it as a kid. Granted, I sorta kinda got a taste of that since my parents let me watch “The Wizard of Oz” around age 5 and I got to see a grayscale Kansas morph into a technicolor Oz. This was at an innocent age where I was still pretty new to the world and didn’t understand that what I was seeing was from the Great Depression. So to an extent it imprinted on my upbringing kinda like those early 60’s Elvis and Beach Boys songs. (Incidentally when I first saw Steven Spielburg’s “E.T.” around 1995 as a 5 year old, I thought it was present day. Might explain why I’m so nostalgic for a decade I wasn’t even alive to see.) But the Wizard of Oz was just one VHS tape in a library of overwhelmingly color films. So I can’t completely relate to Tom Hanks. I have to imagine how that must have felt.

There was a similar account where Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony, writes in his book “Made in Japan” about how his father got a record player sometime in the 1910’s or 1920’s. He described how his family would gather around and marvel at this thing that produced music for them to listen to. I’ll never be able to relate to that because I grew up with FM radio and cheap cassette tapes and players. The future has proven to be surprisingly boring because when everything is available, nothing feels special. So it’s as if I have time travel back to when the “noise floor” was at the level of a Sega Genesis game to feel impressed again.

My friend’s son had his 8th birthday lately. He got a few games as gifts. One of them was a Playstation game we can talk about on this site on March 23, 2028. I had already listened to reviews for it online, convincing me the game wasn’t my thing. However, my young friend really, really, really wanted to play it with me. He would bring it up every chance he got. I kept trying to steer him toward something else that might appeal more to both of us. He would politely go along with my suggestions, but would squirm restlessly and lose interest in whatever we were playing after 5 minutes. So I relented.

We’ve all probably seen this chart:



My young friend’s new game is the right side of that chart distilled into weaponized form. I don’t even know where to begin. Maybe 1982?



The golden age of arcades in the early 1980’s faced the quandary of fleecing quarters from the public using computer hardware with extremely limited memory and clock cycles. Dazzling the viewer with an unlimited variety of scenery and objects wasn’t technologically possible. This necessitated enticing people to come back again and again using a threadbare number of game elements. The elements themselves were budgeted stringently, but the web of interactions between each element had to be exponentially vast.

This innovation - the skill-based high score genre - is what elevated video games over their ancestors: the carnival amusement machines, which were mostly games of chance. So, video games evolved from push-button novelties and for-profit Skinner boxes into something closer to golf or chess. This rhetoric what finally convinced the governor of New York to legalize pinball in 1976, because the municipality classified them as gambling up until that point.

While the high score genre didn’t last into the next 25 years, memory and CPU limitations did, so video games in the 90’s and early 2000’s were still about making finite game elements interact with one another in a vast number of ways. Multimedia flourishes and 3D polygons were introduced, but for the most part iterative rearrangement of game elements and the player’s skill stayed at the core of game design philosophy. This is why Super Mario 64, a game whose code and assets total no more than 6 megabytes, takes tens of hours to play through for the first time.

Then sometime in the late 2000’s Moore’s Law overcame the memory and CPU limits and film-quality graphics became possible. After that, the structure of video games began to shift from a complex web to a linear sequence, like films. The player advances down a one-way corridor, encounters elements in a scripted order, and performs preordained actions to advance. The actions generally don’t ask much in terms of reflexes, critical thinking, or any other prowess. However, lavish multimedia rivaling a Hollywood production cultivate the illusion that the player asserts an influential role over these elements. This is accomplished by appeals to the player’s sense of urgency and ego. Generally the player is unable to influence the final destination or outcome of the corridor.

Despite claims to the contrary, I don’t think these are video games. They’re more like virtual theme park rides that be can experienced in the home. Or maybe they’re the high tech offspring of early 90’s Full Motion Video games. Anyway, these self-proclaimed video games continue to grow in popularity and prevalence, and newcomers like my 8 year old friend can’t get enough of them.

A wisely written statement about a poignant observation on modern media in general. I certainly find myself thinking this way when it comes to modern gaming. When I was growing up, gaming was a continued stream of new experiences and exciting technological innovations. I don't find myself continuously impressed with new games anymore. I guess VR is exciting if you can afford it (or even want to bother setting it all up). Rather I find myself excited by older games, going back to see what I missed; finding deep or idiosyncratic game design which isn't made these days. The 5th gen especially was prime with fresh ideas and experimental genre hybrids.


I think it really boils down to continual feelings of accomplishment. Every time you do something successful in a game, you feel like you achieved some little thing. Beating a game can be a real sense of satisfaction due to the holistic effort involved. Of course it's mostly a shallow achievement, you pushed the right buttons to make the memory bits flip and pixels glow in a way that the designers intended to constitute victory. Looking at it from that base of a level, building a canoe isn't much different. You pushed the tools in the right way to make wood atoms align in a way that constitutes a floating vehicle. Whatever. In the end it's all about a sense of accomplishment through applied skill. Albeit some accomplishments may be seen as more esteemed, if they also offer others joy as well. Like building a merry-go-round for a park or curing cancer. I do think that focusing entirely on one sole hobby, and not diversifying one's interests, makes for a narrow or boring mind.


I wrote something to that effect once: ardentexhuminator.blogspot.com/2014/08/time-out-for-fun_12.html

It's true gaming takes energy, and after a long day, not every adult can muster that energy up. Drinking beers while watching TV is far easier (and far less rewarding).


That's true, but I think there's also the empowerment factor. Many pople want to feel powerful when they play games. So easy games where you are immediately gratified by feeling powerful... popular! The latest God of War encapsulates both of these vectors precisely.