Do you feel like older games or shows for younger audiences or older games used to assume we could just...keep up?

I ask this because i notice how many older tv shows or games just let you jump into a story and didn't use the first few eps or gameplay points to break down how the plot works or the controls. Maybe because we had...well booklets that told us that or shows for kids were not about plot just flashy colors to sell toys cause people at the time labeled them at a ceiling for story and only wanted them to end each episode telling you a lesson. I rant.

Anyhow, I feel like older shows or games were kinda...hard by today's standards to “get” and kids today aren't as unable to get “it” as people think, but we kept going to the lowest common denominator that we lost something i cant put my finger on. Like how jumping in mario doesn't need a big hey, this is how you jump. Or you died because a thing hit you don't touch it, it's like we knew how to edit responses better. Nowadays, even films will stop to tell you and break down the plot. Character A: I'm confused what are we doing again Character B: Ugh, again we need to disrupt the lasers so we win, you have to do this.... IDK.

the phrasing was a bit weird there but i get what you mean . alot of it is 'dumbed down' for ppl . i get why they do it but yeah sometimes it sorta sucks , i guess sometimes i do agree generally that targeting the 'dumbest' for lack of better phrasing can impede critical thinking cause when you take away the need for it your less likely to do it? ... i'm sure i sound horrible in my wording there too frankly but it sounds harsher than intended i think.

Yes, but those old games also tended to have simpler gameplay and cheat codes.

I think I know what you mean. I had a realization these past few weeks after going down the rabbit hole of watching a bunch of TV from the UK. I realized that Americans show assume you’re an idiot and UK shows assume you’re NOT an idiot. Go example they make some comments or references in UK television that are funny but you have to know what referring to and sometimes it’s history, religion, some old pop culture phenomenon etc and American television is like, falling down is funny. I’m not hating and I love some older American sitcoms it just something I noticed.

@meekodraf: I think I know what you mean. I had a realization these past few weeks after going down the rabbit hole of watching a bunch of TV from the UK. I realized that American shows assume you’re an idiot and UK shows assume you’re NOT an idiot. For example they make some comments or references in UK television that are funny but you have to know what they’re referring to and sometimes it’s history, religion, some old pop culture phenomenon etc and American television is like, falling down is funny. I’m not hating and I love some older American sitcoms it just something I noticed.

With games, I think it's a bit real culture change and a bit of generation kvetching, honestly. There are some objective factors, like games didn't used to have tutorials because memory was too precious to use on them. As such, there was no ramp up, you have to have a base level of skill of familiarity that even reading the manual might not prep you for, and that initial skill wall could cloud your vision of the whole game, even if it isn't actually hard past the learning phase.

Also, if ytou are going real old-school, a lot of those games were arcade ports, and arcade games WERE harder for one very specific reason, and that was to extract quarters from your pocket.

As for shows, well, there were plenty of shows back when that were episodic in nature, which means that every episode kinda reset the stage. Ongoing storylines were just for soap operas for a long time. Twin Peaks is often credited as the show that made season-long arcs a mainstream thing, and that wore it's soap opera influence on it's sleeve. Other shows at the time like Star Trek or The Wonder Years rarely kept consistent plot elements from episode to episode. It did happen, but not in the way that some of the shows nowadays do it, where a season is essentially an 8 hour movie. As such, you could jump in pretty much anywhere and miss a few episodes. This was also done for the practical reason of broadcast tv, if you didn't see it on time, you would have to wait for a rerun or just be out of luck, so most shows kept it simple with the episodic reset. Better that than lose viewership because they had to work through the broadcast time.

Your dialogue example absolutely happened back in the day, too. The "As you know..." lines and backstory fill-ins were just as ham-fisted then as it ever got to be. As a certified old fuck, I remember because I was there and also I re-watch old shows quite often.

One thing that is worse, though, is the snarkification of characters. Like everyone is a "confident, quirky" character, and that has flattened out personalities in shows in a way that can make some more modern shows bland and seem "easier." Like many things in life, I blame Joss Whedon.

But on the whole, I think shows are just as smart and hard as anything in the past, and also just as stupid and easy. It is possible there are more easy shows now just because there are a lot more shows period. Like, I feel anything with The CW logo on it is easy, simple and shockingly numerous.

Yes! Emphatically so, especially with games! I've been playing a bunch of PS2 era games and they used to actually trust you to use trial and error to figure things out. They didn't sand off all the edges on everything to stop you from hurting yourself. Hitting points of friction then having to stop and think for a minute was a common thing. This friction gave games character. A lot of big modern games (think Assassin's Creed or Horizon) don't have this friction at all and the result is that the game starts to feel samey and bland after a short while. When there's little to no risk of failure, the game stops being interesting because you know you're going to get through it so long as you keep hitting buttons.

That's not to say I am against tutorials, hints, or instructions in games. They have a place. It's just that at some point the training wheels need to come off and they need to trust you to play the game. A shocking number of modern games I've played feel like the entire game is a tutorial or that they are shouting the solution at you constantly.

Like I just finished playing Final Fantasy X on PS2 for the first time. There are so many things in FFX that would never ever show up in modern games. The Sphere Grid, despite not actually being complicated, looks complicated so it would have been dumbed down. There are multiple bosses later in the game that require you to actually understand the status effect system well to beat (brute force is literally not possible with a couple of them). That would never happen now because in most modern big budget western games, they always give a way for you to brute force your way through any problem since that's what the most basic of game players will try to do. FFX also forces you to understand the weaknesses and strengths of each party member so you can take advantage of the quick teammate swapping to beat enemies. There's enemies that only Wakka can reliably hit, or enemies that don't take physical damage, forcing you to switch to Lulu or Yuna to beat them with magic. The game tells you a bit about this system early on but past that it's up to you to figure everything out.

Those three examples are just things off the top of my head, I'm sure there's tons of others from that game. Final Fantasy was a mainstream series back in the day and FFX was a tentpole release for the PS2 in 2001. Normal people played the game, not just RPG sickos. They trusted that people, especially the kids and teens the games were targeted at, could figure it out. And they did. Now game companies, especially western publishers, are scared of making people think like that.

No no, I totally get what you mean here. If you make it so every problem can be solved with a hammer, then most people will just use a hammer. A lot of mainstream big budget games now are scared of pushing people out of their comfort zone and will let them use the thing they're familiar with rather than forcing them to try something new.

Yeah, definitely, especially in terms of exposition. I don't know when storytellers in games, movies, and TV shows in particular decided their audiences were so fucking dumb they had to be fed exposition for the first fifth of a thing, but that's an annoyance I wouldn't mind seeing an end to. Assume that your audiences can learn by context or weave the exposition into the plot if you absolutely have to, but stop with info dumping right out of the gate.

I go back and forth on whether gaming is being dumbed down. The yellow paint situation has always existed, just in different forms. Use the same metal texture to indicate a climbable surface, here's a flyby of the level indicating where to go next and so on.

I do think games now lean more on getting the player through it. Consuming the content seems more desired than exploring what you can do with the toolset.

Oh right, one other thing I forgot. Regarding games and manuals, yes that was a huge deal. Last year I played through Persona 3 FES for the first time since 2009. I was surprised by how few tutorials there were in the game outside of the extreme basics. Then I thought to check and see what the manual was like since I still have a physical copy of the game. It turns out, that manual was pretty long and detailed literally every aspect of how the game worked mechanically. I didn't need to run to Google to figure out basic game functionality because if I looked in the manual it was guaranteed to be there.

This relates to the issue of why new games have to constantly remind you of things. If there's no trusted source of information to reference, you have to rely on either the game reminding you or you looking things up yourself since most games don't include a repository of information. If games included some type of manual-like reference that was actually good, most people wouldn't need to rely on these sites and games wouldn't need to constantly remind or retutorialize people on concepts in their games. But people can't be trusted to read things anymore so here we are.

@ben_h:yeah you aren't wrong there , i do miss a good old fashion manual , some do have digital ones in-game but those are few and far between and usually rather small/basic vs old days. your right about FFX its my favorite entry ( also my first) and i swear i was stumped in the same area too many times as a kid and just restarted it till i learned how things actually worked ,.. didn't matter tho cause the world and its characters were great , wakka in particular had a great amount of character growth. i played persona FES on my ps3 about 11 years ago now , it took a bit of trial and error for aspects to click and i definately lost Hours of progress a couple times thanks to being one shot , i do wonder how i would've faired if i read a manual for it now that you mention it lol.

for things like context tells i don't honestly mind them but when side characters and monologues hit you over the head with hints it can be a bit much depending on the game.

now that you mention it , while i don't watch much if any uk shows i do watch alot of asian dramas , and those too tend to be a bit more like you mentioned uk stuff being as well depending on the genre, its no surprise i haven't watched much us tv over the last 10 or so years