Golden Age of Gaming?

Recently I was reading an article posted on ign.pc, (found here http://www.ign.com/blogs/jdavisign/2012/02/16/this-is-the-golden-age-of-video-games) it suggested that we are currently living in the “Golden Age of gaming.”

I don't particularly agree with this statement. While it is true that many great things have come out of the past decade or so, is it really a “Golden Age?” JDavisIGN, the author, gives some of the same reasons that many people give why gaming is great now. Massive AAA titles, social network gaming, massive indie gaming, and that's about it. I felt most of these points were relatively weak and broad. Painting too smeared of a picture to really articulate a single, good reason why we are in a Golden Age for gaming.

I immediately thought of Classical Hollywood Cinema as the closest relatable Golden Age to gaming as both are heavily visually based entertainment.

The time span of the Classical Hollywood Cinema was from the late 1920s up to the early 1960s. During this time films began to express similar concepts of Renaissance ideals, the resurgence of mankind and romanticism. Classical storytelling began to dictate the story, focusing on character progression over a period of time instead of stock characters. Human emotion was more important that lighting or scenery, with the camera staying a medium to medium-long shot to capture the experience that the people were in along with their faces. Uniformity occurred from film studio to film studio so that an MGM picture would look different from a Warner Brothers picture. That doesn't mean creativity and auteurs couldn't exist. Fantastic people were there, actors and directors alike.

The Classical Hollywood Cinema era was more than just big budget movies and independent visionaries. Every little detail from the script up mattered to help create a film that would become a classic.

Does that mean every single film was amazing? Of course not! There were flops, bad actors, bad scripts, bad directors, whatever. The contrary is true, too. Does that mean that, today, we can't have classic movies being made? Of course not! We still have visionaries from the mid 1960s and onwards!

This is where I think that JDavisIGN made his mistake. First and foremost, he sees activity at a broader level indicating a Golden Age. Further, he sees the ability to have a big-budget AAA game and release indie games side by side as a sign of a Golden Age. Both reasons, to me, are simply silly. There is no correlation between these and having a Golden Age. We're simply in a good time, or really, an acceptable time.

Mass-Market AAA Titles

As I already stated, big budget projects does not have a correlation to a golden age. The film industry drops millions of dollars on AAA films, are we in a golden age? No. While it certainly is very nice that we have the means to spend so much money on entertainment, the two are simply unrelatable.

The XBLA/PSN Middle Ground

“The rise of Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, Wii Ware, and DSi Ware has given rise to an entire video game category that quite literally didn't (coudn't!) exist just five short years ago.” This is an absurd statement. We're very reliant on 3rd party distributors still, especially for anything on a console. But, for the PC at least, we've been able to distribute games since the dawn of the modern internet. Hell, even before that people would post programming scripts for people to copy in magazines and on the proto-internet news post listings. If you want to stick to the distributor tradition, though, Steam has been doing this type of thing for quite some time now. In fact, many of the games he listed were initially developed on the PC through Steam as the distributor. I see these additional 3rd party distributors as nothing more than console specific knockoffs.

Experimental Success Stories

He uses the word “experimental” as if it is something only a small niche of people ever want. Innovation is a key aspect for many things in our lives and history as a whole. Simply restricting it to gaming, Wolf3D innovated on the original arcade game Wolfenstein. Doom then further innovated the relatively new FPS genre along with new, true 3D graphics. These games were once “experimental.” They're also success stories. Nothing new here. Move along.

Mass Market & Mainstream Acceptance

With this point, I do somewhat agree with him. Somewhat; however, it's a very odd point. While it is very true that the Wii has invaded many households, businesses, and retirement homes alike, do video games really have a mass market appeal and, further, acceptance? People my age (that mythical age of twenty-somethings) may very well be a little more open to gaming as a whole (though I've met quite a few general technophobes), we grew up with video gaming. Mario and Pokemon and Link/Zelda. Nintendo Hard. But for people not of that generation, gaming is still viewed as a time waster, something that isn't an art, something that kills and causes psychological disorders.

It is true that gaming has gained a broader appeal thanks social networking games (those are the real killers! Of time I mean) but this is a very acute niche of gaming. I also doubt their acceptance of my preferred games, having been told by people who play this new wave of social network gaming that I'm wasting time playing Pokemon again. I don't know, while I agree more people are playing video games, I also feel there's a new double standard that wasn't there before.

TL;DR - aka The Resurgance of Long-Dead Ideals

Besides misspelling “resurgence,” his point is that because we have big AAA titles happening alongside indie 2D platformers, adventure games, and everything else, we must be in a Golden Age. Nothing to do with ideals... just... genres of games that have all have been around since the beginning of video gaming (some prior). Just because the FPS genre has been the biggest genre since the mid 1990s doesn't mean everything else simply stopped existing. Hell, FPS was in existence in the 1970s! To me, this logic is like saying no other music exists from 1960-present except rock music, because that's what was/is popular. While other music may not necessarily be at the forefront of popularity, they're still there.

My point is that there is nothing new. We might have more accessibility, thanks to faster internet speeds and more people connected, but does this really constitute a Golden Age of gaming? I think not.

For me, and many others, the Golden Age of gaming has already come and gone. 1995-2005 is (roughly) the Golden Age of gaming where many fantastic games began to innovate and expand graphically, gameplay wise, audiably, and accessibly. Monumental games were created in this time, series began in this time, we innovated and grew so much, so quickly in this time. Moreover, video games were romanticizing themselves. Traditional narrative was normal in this time, humanism the goal. We slowly even began to achieve, though limited, emotion in our characters. The pinnacle in video gaming is Half-Life 2. Especially for the FPS genre. Ever since then we've sort of come down from the high point. We still have many amazing games being produced. But as a piece of art? Nothing has really compared to the overall experience that Half-Life 2 brought us. From graphics, to the story, to the sound, to the gameplay. It's all there.

I could say so much to prove my point, but I'm a bit biased as I, like many others, grew up in this time.
Instead, I chose to simply give you a link to see for yourselves how far we've come.

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2008/12/video-game-design-between-1990-2008/

-PancakeDestruction