It's amazing how bad video games are compared to 30 years ago

An old man's rant that happens to be true

We recently dusted off the Morris family’s 27-year-old iMac G3 for the kids to play old games on. It is remarkable how well this machine holds up after nearly three decades. It still runs Mac OS 8.6, which is, I think, a whopping 23 operating systems ago; but for the fact that you cannot use its 1999 architecture to interface with the 2025 Internet, you can still use this comparatively ancient software to do do pretty much anything the average computer user wants to do. You can write stuff; you can print stuff; you can keep important records; you can play some fun distracting games for a bit; it all still runs smoothly and without incident. That should give us pause, right? Two dozen updates over roughly a quarter-century and they really haven’t improved on it much at all, and yet for some reason we keep giving them more and more money every time they put some new junk out. This is really something of a puzzle. Why do we do this? Who convinced us? What a pickle we’re in.

Of course, without the ability to send email or safely conduct any real business online, something like the iMac G3 can’t really serve as much more than an appealing, beguiling relic. So it’s a good little gaming computer at this point and little else. And honestly, that’s fine for the Morris family, because if we’re going to let our kids play video games we absolutely do not want them to play anything manufactured much after this computer’s pinnacle. I’m not sure if you’re aware but video games today are really very, very bad, both in relative and absolute terms.

That sounds like an old man’s lament, and indeed the reflexive meme in the present moment is to dismiss any sort of temporal criticism as just that, the grumpy rumblings of old people pining for the unblemished glory of their youth. But this kind of counter-criticism is simply the refuge of lazy people who can’t meaningfully articulate an aesthetic argument, the kind of people who think teaching Fat Joe and the Terror Squad lyrics in a senior lit course is materially identical to teaching Shakespeare or Flaubert. “All art is subjective!” they scream. This is a lie, of course. Some things are better than other things, and some of those better things were made a long time ago. Moreover in some cases the incentives for artistic creation are different from one generation to the next, and it’s okay to acknowledge that, and to do your criticism with that in mind. For example: In the mid-1950s there was a huge impetus for musicians to make peppy, snappy, teenage-centric doo-wop songs and splatter platters. This was obviously a combined function of both the U.S. postwar shift toward domestic, middle-grade simplicity as well as a response to what the author Jon Savage calls “the invention of the teenager,” a group who in the postwar period had “newly visible spending power” and “its own rituals, rights and demands.” This created a very specific sound of music, one with its own modalities and rhythms and conventions that are obvious in retrospect and were obvious even then. It may have been good music or it may have been bad but it was obviously very distinct and has to—and can—be judged on its merits, particularly in light of the wildly more complex and inventive forms of music that came in the decades after. Hey gee, I just made a critical assertion about a form of art. You see how easy that is? See how you can identify the provenance and the structure of a creative thing, think about it a little bit, and from there craft some sort of interesting, compelling argument about its value that might change someone’s mind? It’s really not hard!

That’s what I’m after with video games here: They suck these days. They’re very bad. As cultural artifacts they are awful on their own merits, but they are triply so when compared with what was done 20 or 30 years ago.

If I had to distill the entire miserable state of video gaming today to its barest essence, it would go something like this: Video games have ceased being genuinely fun and have instead become disorienting, annoying and overstimulating.

It is better to demonstrate with examples so you can see for yourself. But before we get into that, we should clarify something: It is, by and large, lame for adults to play video games. It is a pastime for children and is much better preserved that way. There are exceptions, of course; one of them is when an adult plays video games with his own children, in particular games from his own childhood that he wants to experience with his kids in a communal sort of way. Playing “The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past” alone as a 35-year-old man is really rather depressing; playing it with your kids, as a fun group narrative adventure, is fine in moderation.

That’s the only way by which I play any video games these days — with my children — and in doing this one can gain a unique perspective on just how video games have shifted over the past few decades. We have a pretty ironclad rule in our house that what little games our kids play are generally pre-2000 or so, with a few exceptions, mostly because modern video games suck and also in no small part because LGBT activists have succeeded in permeating video games as much as they have every other sector of pop culture, so in picking up a modern video game you’re never quite sure if you’re going to encounter a transgender three-year-old NPC who tries to convince your own children it might be a good idea to cut their genitals off.

Yet though we never play those games, one inevitably comes across modern gaming media — on news feeds, Internet commercials, and so forth — and thus it’s not hard to get a sense of where things are these days, and how miserable it’s all become.

One prime example is “Oregon Trail.” You may very well know this game for its having been turned into a meme by aging Gen Xers/Millennials. Seemingly everyone between the ages of 32 and 45 played this game at some point in a Des Moines elementary school computer lab. Everybody’s gotta do the joke: "Oh yeah I always just died of dysentery huh huh ha ha huh huh.” Yes, we get it: You played “Oregon Trail “ and you died of dysentery. In reality, “Oregon Trail” was and remains a really fine and lovely game, one rendered all the more fine by the fact that they simply do not make anything like it anymore, at all. It was developed by a company called the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), appropriately a pioneer in the then-nascent computer software industry. They produced “Oregon Trail,” and a few other spinoffs like “Amazon Trail” and “Yukon Trail.” Then as now, one’s consumer choices defined one’s domestic sphere in a distinctive way: Most of us were Oregon Trail houses, but everyone had that odd friend who was obsessed with Yukon Trail and who insisted, wrongly, that it was the better trail game. Stop trying to make “Yukon Trail” happen, kid!

MECC also produced some bizarrely enchanting titles like “Odell Down Under, “ a game where you got to swim around as a fish, and eat plankton, and try and avoid getting eaten by sharks—it was great, I don’t know, you had to be there. One of their earliest titles was a text-based game called “Lemonade Stand,” which consisted of running…well, you know. This last game proved so successful that Apple bundled it in their 512Ke and IIGS platforms for years. It can be hard to comprehend that the sexy, macrobiotic, hyper-mobile billion-dollar Apple Inc. used to include a game about running lemonade stands in its top-of-the-line personal computers. It was just a different time.

“Oregon Trail” unmistakably comes from a different time, too. In an era where children’s media has become neurotically obsessed with making everything sort of semi-educational, like an endless SOL prep, “Oregon Trail” was about as close as one might get to making a video game function mostly as a book. This game embodied a formula that we might describe as “high information/low stimulation” (which also pretty much perfectly describes the book format itself). Most of the game’s kinetic action consists of watching an animated covered wagon amble across some extremely sparse digital plains. Seemingly 80% of the gameplay is just reading text. Sound is at a relative minimum. I know it sounds crazy, but you actually, genuinely do learn things when playing this game—a little bit of American history, a little ecology, some geology. You can’t play Oregon Trail and avoid actually learning something.

There is something so quietly appealing about this type of video game. It asks very little of you and really does give you a good deal in return—very much like a book, in its own way. Everything is clear and clean and intelligible. You are never confused about what’s happening at any one time. This is all very human-scale digital entertainment, made with the human mind in mind. The illustrations are lovely, probably hand-drawn by some guy in Hennepin County. It’s all very thematic in an understated way: It sort of looks like the pages of an 1845 scrapbook, or a commonplace, but it’s not overdone. Look, it’s just nice—it’s a well-done video game that lets you have fun while teaching you a few interesting things. That’s good stuff.

Obviously, times being what they are, this game has been retooled and remade multiple times in recent years, most recently in 2023, always of course with an ironic nostalgia: Ha ha hur hur it’s the dysentery, folks (“Surviving blizzards, broken limbs, snakebites, exhaustion, starvation, and the dreaded dysentery is no small feat,” the remake’s description reads). Nobody needed another Oregon Trail. The first one was great. If we want to play that, we can play that. Nothing is accomplished, nobody is well served, by remaking a game that was already good and which we’ve already played. I don’t know how to state it more simply than this. And I think that dearth of meaning becomes all the more clear when you actually see what they made this game into:

I don’t think I need to belabor just how quaintly, uniquely awful this game is, both on its own merits and especially compared to the original. It is just breathtaking how relentlessly loud and busy it is—it’s an endless series of clinks, plinks, plunks, beeps, rings, dings, plops, ca-chings, ca-dunks. A neverending parade of streaming text and eruptive graphics makes the whole thing feel like a digital slot machine. The game aggressively incentivizes relentless action: Harvesting buffalo nonstop, arranging your “discard area,” “repacking” your junk. At no point do you ever get to savor any one moment of anything about this game; your eyes and your mind are always inexorably being pulled to something half an inch a way, perpetually, without letup. Where the original game is a quiet, pleasant distraction, one in which the player might actually learn something about 19th century Wyoming, the newest game is just one more digital cacophony, yet another loud, annoying, unenjoyable mess of information overload. It stinks.

This is the sort of thing that produces what we might call a permanent attention deficit. It’s designed to keep the player hyper-stimulated, unable to focus on any one thing, incapable of seeing either the whole or the parts in any lasting way. Really, the game being played here is not actually the “game” itself—it’s the bubbles and beeps and green +2s and little lightning bolts zipping across the stream at any one time, the bizarre metallic slicing sounds that come when you shoot buffalo, the popups and alerts and relentless messages. The point of this game isn’t to play it, exactly; nor is it to even accomplish something in the linear sense of the word; it’s rather to induce a generalized stimulus to the brain, just hammering the thalamus over and over again, perpetually, with no chance for any sort of break, let alone a moment to really dwell on anything or think deeply about anything you’ve experienced.

This is, in the main, how video games are these days. They are just a neverending stream of overwhelming stimulus. And it’s awful. It overwhelms the mind and surely, after enough time, it shapes the mind as well—shapes it into something that cannot be comfortable without this profoundly overpowering level of stimulant. I don’t think it’s a mistake that this cascading, overindulgent form of media consumption has dovetailed with an era in which nearly half of all children, according to some data, spend more than eight hours per day on screens. It’s extremely unhealthy.

But also, it sucks. It’s just lame, cartoonish and childish in the worst way possible. A media format that thinks you can’t function without hearing some irritating bell or chime every 1.2 seconds is a media format that thinks you’re a moron and is treating you accordingly. The best video games, like the best media of any format, have always assumed that the consumer can fill in some gaps, that he can supply a bit of the necessary magic that makes a thing enjoyable. In radio, where that participatory relationship is considerably more obligatory than in visual mediums, they call it “theater of the mind” (television, quipped Steve Allen, is “the theater of the mindless”). A video game, of course, does considerably more ocular legwork than a radio broadcast ever can, but there was at least a time when game designers generally didn’t feel the need to fire every single synapses of your brain during every single second of gameplay. This made, inarguably, for better gaming.

Here’s another great example: The seminal 1996 Nintendo 64 title “Super Mario 64.” One of the finest games ever devised, it was a watershed in 3D gaming (and increasingly looks like one of the high watermarks of gaming all told, but you already knew that) and remains playable today in ways that most modern video games try and fail to achieve. It’s just a great game. In it, Mario must traipse through Princess Peach’s castle, laboriously gathering stars from a series of enchanted paintings, stomping the crap out of a bunch of filthy Goombas along the way, stealing the shells off of hapless turtles, picking up Bob-ombs and throwing them at other Bob-ombs so both of them explode at the same time, spanking the absolute fluff out of Bowser himself—I mean it’s real stuff. At one point Mario ventures into the castle’s deep, warrenous basement, which also happens to be a mine, in order to steal more stars:

In recent years game critics have identified just how liminal “Super Mario 64” is—liminal in the sense that the game is characterized by “empty or abandoned locations that evoke a sense of surrealism and nostalgia.” In a genre and a franchise usually marked by cheerful, upbeat, optimistic, Italian plumber screwball slapstick, “Super Mario 64” is just full of scenes like the one depicted above: Large rooms that are hauntingly empty, devoid of life except for a few abandoned, scrabbling enemies; a kind of unsettling, weird vacantness, like a big abandoned hospital or empty high school; the feeling that you have been left behind in some sort of limitless void, a billion miles of emptiness on all sides of you.

It’s extremely odd. But it’s also great, delightfully weird like a wedge of wet Minschterkaas, just fun and unique. Overall it’s just a fantastic game, mechanically captivating, with great puzzles and clever gameplay bolstered by that odd, quiet aesthetic. There’s no other game ever been made like it, certainly not a Mario game. And ultimately this game is representative of a time when games by-and-large were just quieter and less chaotic and more thoughtful. I’m not saying all these games were Mozart; it’s just that they weren’t all coke-fueled EDM, and it was better.

Here’s the sort of Mario game they’re putting out today, vis. “Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury,” where even the title itself is overwhelming:

Again, the most immediately evident feature of this game is just the total wall of sound one is blasted with when playing it. It swamps the entire experience. There are just so many pops, dings, plinks, farts, bells, whistles, whips—the sound just doesn’t let up, and what’s worse is that all those sounds resemble the stuff you hear from those incredibly depressing legalized slot machines you see in gas stations and convenience stores these days. It all sounds so grimly generic, like something out of a cheap Internet sound bank, but still it just overshadows the gameplay, making it inescapable to get away from.

Beyond that, the gameplay itself has obviously been designed to be more frenetic, more relentless, less of a thinking game and more of a mindless, noisy, unceasing parade of stimuli. It’s meant to gratify some deep and stupid part of your lizard brain, to reward your primitive synapses with stuff they think is necessary for survival. All of the plinging, the endless colorful pops and explosions, it’s all meant to satisfy a deadweight hunter-gatherer portion of your mind, tricking you into thinking you’re collecting shiny, edible baubles that will somehow make your life better, or at least longer-lasting.

Another way of putting this is that video games today have becoming increasingly childish—not childlike, mind you, not whimsical or fanciful or innocently creative and fun, but childish: simplistic, uncreative, basely motivated, ultimately boring. This is a problem for two reasons. The first is that the largest demographic of video game consumers is actually adults: Data indicate that more than 75% of U.S. gamers are adults, while the “demographic of video gamers is typically 35 years old.” So gamers are getting older, but the junk they’re playing is growing increasingly immature and shallow and ultimately deadening. That’s a recipe for stunted growth, what little of it has not been stunted already. Beyond that, the children who do play video games are now themselves being lowered rather than elevated; the games now play to their basest, cheapest instincts rather than, potentially, something higher, or at least something neutral. I mean, look, I’m not trying to say “Oregon Trail” was the Codex Leicester, but if you had to put money on which game would sharpen a child’s mind even a little bit, would you bet on the original “Oregon Trial” or the shitty plinko remake? Which game do you think would occupy a more interesting, cerebral part of a child’s brain—the beguiling quietude of “Super Mario 64” or the shitty plinko cacophony of whatever the other game is?

I want to belabor this point: There is something at stake here. Something is being gambled, and lost, with all of this. If pressed, most of us non-gamers will admit that, yes, video games are dispensable, among the lower forms of entertainment and among the least intellectually rewarding, with some notable exceptions. But we also shouldn’t overthink it. A good video game can be a fun way for a kid to pass the time, in moderation, and for parents to pass the time with their kids, and in very rare cases they can rise to the level of something akin to art, the sort of thing you like to muse about with your friends from time to time. It’s not as if they have no recreational value whatsoever, at least in theory. The problem isn’t with video games per se, but rather very bad ones—games which detract, at scale, from the human stock of curiosity and creativity and interesting thought. Which is pretty much all they seem to do now.

If you can’t swallow that, you might at least agree that, though a stupid video game industry might not be a virulent ruiner of a culture, it at least might be symptomatic of that culture’s ruin—which is all the more reason to at least be aware of it.

And it’s hard to miss it once you look. Consider “Donkey Kong Country,” one of the great platformer games of all time as well as one of the great franchise reboots in pop culture history. Up to that time Donkey Kong had been a menace, an evil, barrel-throwing, princess-kidnapping monkey villain, but with “Donkey Kong Country” he became a valiant hero, a Kong on a quest, a man wronged, his banana hoard stolen for no reason by the evil King K. Rool, an alligator who presumably didn’t even eat bananas. It has all the trappings of one of the great monomyths of literary history, and it was also just a great stinking game, fun from start to finish. Here’s a representative sample:

It’s good. The action is tight and focused, the flow is dynamic and satisfying, you always have something to do but you never feel like you’re swamped with information overload, the sound effects and the score feel more or less like a monkey created and composed them, the animation is crisp and clear and legible. It’s just a well-done game, very playable and still a technologically and aesthetically impressive effort more than 30 years later.

Here, meanwhile, is “Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze,” the fifth entry in the Donkey Kong Country series, though the 18th of the series in general, because apparently no franchise can go without forty or fifty iterations these days, I guess:

Why go on too much at this point? You get it by now—the noise, the busyness, the chaotically overfilled landscape exploding out of the screen at every step of the way. One of the more grating elements to modern video gaming that we might note here is how often the interesting, atmospheric elements of the earlier days of gaming have been lost in favor of too-glossy, too-polished HD slop. The graphical power of video games have never been stronger than they are now, and yet it all looks stupider, more low-effort, and less engrossing than things made three decades ago, even when you factor in the momentous differences in spatial resolution.

Does any of this matter? I think it all does, as a piece to something larger and more troubling going on, which is the overall collapse of imagination we’ve seen en masse in the past decade or so. We’ve seen it in movies, we’ve seen it in plenty of literature, and it’s taken place in video games, too — video games, which, if they are at worst a frivolous distraction, might at least aspire to something higher than stupid, clamorous stupefaction for adults.

I do not think any readers will be surprised to know that I blame the smart phone for much of this—the smart phone, which has stripped the collective attention span right down to the bones to the point that game designers must feel it necessary to make everything like a Times Square display, all bright and dumb and jangly. Indeed, mobile devices are arguably the most popular gaming platforms in the world right now, and mobile games are notorious for delivering the kind of attention deficit-inducing, toxically stimulating game formats that now dominate on consoles as well.

So perhaps this is all inevitable, at least for a time—at least so long as smart phones are universally, pervasively ubiquitous throughout our society, which they will be for the foreseeable future. I suppose the ultimate takeaway here is mostly for parents: If you let your kids play video games at all, do not let them play any modern ones, e.g., anything made after, say, 2006 or 2007 at the latest, which is to say (just for reference’s sake) anything made after the advent of the smartphone. Stick to a time when the medium was more interesting and ultimately more rewarding. As justifiably bad as their reputation is — nobody wants their kid to grow up and be an unhealthy, fat, dead-minded gaming zombie — a good video game, played well, can at least be fun recreationally, and like any cultural medium can even serve as a jumping-off point for interesting reflection, thoughtful philosophy, and deeper thought. But you can’t get there if you’re basically playing something guaranteed to scramble your brain and give you ADHD in the process. Just avoid all that at the outset and play Oregon Trail instead.