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My nephews (10 and 13) stayed with me a couple of weeks ago, and I got a chance to see them game. And yeah they are playing mostly Fortnite these days, but they love it. Further, it actually looks pretty intense. Like the editing and jockeying for a clean shot is more nuanced than what I was getting up to.

Like was my obsession with Quake 2 DM that much more elevated? True we had a lot more variety with mods and maps, but if I'm being honest most of my time was just spent running around Q2DM1/The Edge and a handful of other vanilla maps. I did love that Homer skin though, lol.

Anyway, I see them hooting and laughing and the whole time they're chatting with their little friends from school. I can see the joy in it. I wish it wasn't on this centralised, monetised, company platform. But I can see what they like in it.

E found it

Yeah holy shit, we really went through eras playing games, theyve pretty much only ever known fortnite, like modern 18 year olds

Gen X version:

Year 1: Pong

Year 5: PacMan

Year 10: Super Mario Brothers

I mean, they can still play the old games. My kiddo loved Kirby on the NES Classic

Gen X version:

(Had to cheat and put an arcade game for 1980, because I'm not aware of any notable console games from that year. In reality the console games from then looked much, much worse than Pac-Man)

I did 10 yrs of TF2. Better graphics might have come in that time, but I only noticed the phlogastinator.

VR actually went through this from 2014-2024 or so. the original Oculus DK had such chonky pixels, very rudimentary tracking, game integration sucked, no hand controls. it rapidly got better to the point where playing Riven is like straight up being teleported into the world..

..except for like, being able to run around or touch things. so it's stayed niche.

Maybe graphical advancements have slowed down (especially since it takes half a decade to make a game now) but this feels a little disingenuous. Bottom is supposed to be Fortnite? I can see someone playing WoW or Quake or UT for 10 years since its release too.

Theres more variety in gaming today then there ever was, many more single dev games succeeding because they dont need to impress the likes of EA to publish their game thanks to the internet and free distribution. More platforms to choose from and multiplatform releases are more common.

The successes of one game are not reflective whole medium or the current state of gaming.

My take from this meme is that Zoomers and later are more "captured" by a few big platforms than previous ones.

And perhaps earlier ones, too.

Like, my aunts and relatives are trapped on Facebook sharing Trumpy memes. Kids younger than me seems to be really into ultra-short videos or mobile-ish games. The only people I know that know how to use a desktop PC, beyond the bare minimum for work are… about my age? Other than a senior dev.

This is a huge generalization and small sample, but still. I'm not worried about other generations doing things I don’t like (that’s always true, and a good thing), I’m worried about them being more trapped.

Real boomer energy. While graphics improvement flattened out, other things (that are more important) have continued improving.

Off the top of my head.. Zoomers got: Disco Elysium, The Outer Wilds, Undertale, and a million other indies.