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Yes, I think gaming definitely had its golden age from something like 1990-2010. There are a few reasons why I think this was the case. First, as you noted the rate of improvement slowed down dramatically. In the early days of gaming, the capabilities of computers were so limited that the games themselves were limited in what they could do. As computers got faster, it meant that designers had more freedom to do styles of games that previously were either impossible, or not very pleasant to play. You can see the tech progression if you look at graphics (not that graphics make a game fun necessarily, but they are a decent proxy for computing power). If you compare the NES->SNES->PS1->PS2, each console had a massive difference in how good the games looked right out of the gate. When the PS3 came out, the difference was there, but not as stark (though by the time you get to late PS3 games they had advanced enough that they looked clearly better). Then in the PS4 generation, early PS4 games looked the same as PS3 games, and only ever got to the point where they looked modestly better. Now, even years after the PS5 came out, the games still don't look any better than on the PS4. So in the early years there was dramatic improvement in computing power from one generation to the next, then in the 2010s the gains became more modest, and now the gains are barely noticeable. That has meant that designers long since stopped being constrained by the hardware, so the games don't have the rate of improvement they used to. They probably never will again.
Second, the games industry has gotten bigger. In the early days, the AAA games were made pretty much like indie games are now. Doom was made by a handful of guys who were super passionate about making a game that they themselves would love to play. Thus you got incredible games on a regular basis, because they were basically all passion projects. Now, business concerns dominate the AAA game industry. Passionate, talented devs still exist, even at that level, but they are subordinate to the executives who care more about the quarterly profits than how fun the games are. And as the games industry expands, it also gets more devs who aren't particularly talented, but are still making games (look at Bioware these days, or the many indie shovelware projects). Both of these phenomena are due to the industry expanding - you will get more of the good games to some extent, but you also get far more if the bad than you used to.
Finally, the ever-increasing push for graphical prowess has made AAA games expensive to make. Which in turn makes the companies funding them more risk-averse. When you are paying 200 people to make a game for 5 years, that is expensive and you need to sell a lot of copies to not go broke. So you make the games appeal to as many people as possible, in an effort to get as many sales as you can. But as has always been the case, when you make something that is offensive to nobody, it's also interesting to nobody. So AAA games are very bland, because companies need them to be or else they'll lose their shirts because they only sold 1 million copies instead of 5 million.
The good news is that good games are still being made, you just won't find them in the AAA space very often. Look to indie projects, which are still being made as passion projects by small teams just like in the old days. You will have a harder time finding them because there's a lot of crap to sift through in the indie space (due to the low barrier to entry), but the good stuff is really good and worth your time. It's unlikely that we'll ever see another golden age where almost every game coming out is a classic, but there are still good games being made at least.
On point. Games just suck and I am somehwat glad neural networks will at least keep graphic cards useful as I cannot bring myself to enjoy new games. You barely have any changes, id software shipped quake 3 in less than 2 years, a game whose engine was hailed as a marvel and was Carmack's last great hurrah, Carmack who is widely seen as one of the best hackers to ever touch a keyboard.
I am even fine with the lefty woke subversion if the gameplay is good. I just do not want to play the same game with a slightly different re-skin. Half Life, Quake 3/Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex were all first-person mostly shooting heavy games that all played extremely differently. 25 years later, modern games do not have any advances.
This reminds me of something a good hacker I know said which is that the average good hacker today is far worse than a good hacker 25 years ago. We fucked up big time somewhere. How do you take hundreds of millions and 5 years to make the same fucking game Ubisoft. Why is making another Elder Scrolls a two-decade long process when New Vegas was made in percentages of that by a studio you cucked out of payments.
Open worlds like Gothic 2 are much better than anything you get now, bigger just means worse.
To get better at something (hacking) you have to play around with it. That really means you need a challenge which:
As a technology develops, the people who were playing with it when it was simple develop with it. And they are motivated to do by the increased number of useful/fun things they can achieve.
At the same time, as the technology improves, the amount you need to understand about it to get what you decreases. And the amount of training you have to do to achieve anything increases. So the hump gets higher and there are fewer reasons to put in the effort.
For example, you can use 99.9% of the functions of an iPad without knowing what a file system is. On Windows 98, you did have to know, and 98 was the simplest publicly available system out there.
This is why nobody mends/mods their own cars anymore. I know they’re designed to be inaccessible now but to my way of thinking the two go together. You can’t ban meddling with the internals unless the internals are pretty reliable for day to day use.
I also think it’s already almost too late to learn how to use LLMs. Two years ago, even some very simple hacking with prompts / jailbreaks would get you results. Now you need to wade through a lot of stuff if you want an experience better than the standard GPT web UI.
Are you.. high? It takes like 5 minutes and one tutorial to get access to almost completely unfiltered Deepseek through openrouter.ai. You can hook that up to an interface of arbitrary complexity and knock yourself out. The tokens are very generous, took me like 6 hours to exhaust them for 24h.
https://old.reddit.com/r/JanitorAI_Official/comments/1ikn1d7/heres_how_to_use_proxies_deepseek_claude_and/
And you don't have to pay a cent, although the newer deepseek might be rate-limited during high demand times, such as weekend.
This is exactly my point. When GPT3.5 first came out, all you needed was some trivial skill with prompt engineering and imagination to get obviously superior results. No extra software needed.
Now you have to:
Already this is more than the average person can handle, and you’re mostly just replicating the UI but it’s more complicated.
If you actually want more functionality then you need to look into character cards, RAG, function calling etc.
Not only is this now a non-trivial amount of work even for the technical, but you’re not getting any return for it until later. It doesn’t seem that way to you because you already understand how everything works, but already starting LLMs from scratch has become limited to technical people who enjoy making things work for its own sake.
Imagine twenty more years and you see how we got to where we are with video games and cars.
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