I think culture is a big part of game evolution. I wouldnt actually know but I always had the feeling games used to be made by teenage boys sitting around in closets when not sitting around in someones basement playing pen and paper rpgs. A game were you walk foward in a nice quiet peacuful forest then suddenly KABAAM you die from a dragon swallowing you hole whos head popped out of nowere, thats the kind of humor and imagination I would expect from such devs. And for me its sometimes tempting to do such things, I used to make Duke Nukem 3D maps for ex, my second best map was a series of deathtraps were a new player would no doubt be suprised resulting in countless deaths over and over again walking into trap after trap and having to figure out the solution by trial and error usualy cos of very unforgiving timelimits before unavoidable death.
Its certanly fun for a dev to make such things, I had a HUGE grin on my face during the entire construction of that map.
Would I have made such gameplay for a commercial game? Perhaps, but I wouldnt dare to sell it for more then pennies, and I would expect nomore then 10 people buying it, and 8 returning it along with a STRONGLY worded letter.
And it is certanly not the kind of games I enjoy playing myself! I tend to hate difficult games, but there are exceptions, I guess there always is.
Todays buissnessmen in the industry seem to be mostly in the buissness of making money rather then the buissness of making games, and they talk about ways of increasing profit rather then laughing at the ingenious deathtrap they just invented...
My dad played a lot of Zelda 1 on the NES, it was difficult but he could manage it, if he had played my deathtrap map on DN3D he would have died, not smiled, left the computer and never have thaught twice about the game ever again Im quite sure of it.
Also back in the days you had a controller with 2 buttons on it, today theres what? 20-237 or so. That in itself increases the difficulty, I hate when games tell me what buttons to press, but then when I played some slightly modern fps on PC I often go through large parts of the game without doing something like a special ducking move or whatever cos theres so many buttons I forget what they do...
I think the industry of buissness men are trying their best to make games sell as many copies as possible and thats why games are the way they are now, holding peoples hand and being easy and non frustrating and instead trying to wow people with cinematic scenes that look like hollywood movies or something.
I think instead of 1000 people working 6 years to put out one single game that playes movie sequences for 4 hour and then declare THE END and roll a 20 minutes credits list, I think those 1000 people should make like 200 games of different types, but then the already overflowing market would be even more overflowed.
I dont know, even though I like easy games I dont like the games of today, I want more control, I dont want to be told were to go and what to do, I wanna do things my way. I want the graphics to look like videogames rather then colorless hollywood warmovies, in old videogames you had patterns after the pixelresolution and such, you had strong colors, it used to be a marketing slogan how many colors a game could present on a single screen, all of that is gone now.
