Sunday, May 10, 2015

What's up with the negativity of my generation?

I am a child of the late 80's - 90's so in terms of gaming I do have seen and played a lot of games while living through all those gaming eras (the only one I'm missing is the Atari one). Now the thing that surprises me the most about the present time is not how the industry has changed, but the number of people in my generation that are acting weird and negative towards gaming. I even made a small assessment of my very own group of friends and from 25 or so that were avid gamers 10 years ago, only a handful of us carry the same enthusiasm for gaming at this point in time. None of them have retired from gaming, but their attitude is a mere shadow of what it used to be. Be aware that this is not about internet trolls or kids who complain about everything, that I can understand. The ones I am talking about are people that went through the golden era of gaming, enjoyed it to the fullest, but still came out as bitter gamers in the end.

90's kids year 2057
Will this really be the case in 2057? You be the judge...
Yeah, you could say that 25 is a miserable amount of people for that kind of statistic and I thought that as well until I began finding all sorts of comments on the net coming from people that share my same range of age. Now let me show you a few examples things I have read or interpreted.

  • Specific genre lovers that actually hate the genre now for no apparent reason other than "I used to love it, but not anymore". One instance of this is the people from my generation who played and loved Final Fantasy VII, yet they hate the idea of a remake, not because they don't want it, but because they are extremely pessimistic about it, up to the point that it annoys them to hear fans asking for it.
  • People that developed a hate for consoles that goes far beyond what we know as the "pc master race" fanatics.
  • Gamers that have closed themselves to only one type of game (not counting anybody younger than 25).
  • People that have spent their entire lives playing single player games and now say that if a game doesn't have an online more then it is crap.
  • People that say that there are no games to play, yet when somebody shows them games they invent excuse after excuse to keep their hate argument going.
  • People lacking the sense of adventure. These are the ones who ditch a game for the simplest of reasons without really giving it a chance.
Those examples are just the tip of the iceberg of all the things I've found relating to this topic. You see, I know that time makes people change, but after these people spent a great part of their lives deeply immersed in gaming, it is hard to fathom that their attitude can shatter in just a couple of years. It's like having an ideology, it doesn't matter how much stuff you add or remove from it, the base remains the same unless something extreme happens.

Now the question is... Did something extreme actually happened? Has the industry changed so much that it destroyed the spirit of gaming that my generation used to have. On the other hand, could the daily grind of adulthood be the culprit? People from my generation often complain about the new schoolers been "entitled brats", but they don't see how much sand they move themselves. 

I know people from the times of Atari that are more passionate for gaming that most of the people of my age, so how old they are shouldn't be an issue, I know people that are working class gamers (as I am) and they see gaming as they always did so time shouldn't be an issue either. So, as I finish this blog entry, I once again wonder... What happened? It shouldn't be like this, so what in the world went wrong?

More importantly it would be awesome to know what do YOU think it happened? 

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