I've played plenty of games from this era. Was 60 hours not enough time invested in Skyrim before I decided it was an over-hyped disappointment? I think the problem with games today is that they're so over-marketed that they reach a point of never reaching our expectations. Marketing back in the 80s gave you a pretty basic top-down view of things and left so much more to your own experience. You also didn't have the Internet to ruin everything with its fans running every single remotely-quotable joke into the ground ad nauseum; "I USED TO BE AN ADVENTURER LIKE YOU UNTIL I TOOK AN ARROW TO THE KNEE! THE CAKE IS A LIE! BACON!" etc.
Stuff like this is why I still consider my own alma mater to be in Communication Studies instead of Computer Science. I find just the entire concept of marketing to be one that is worthy of much study -- if only so we'll eventually know how to exorcise it from the remaining corpses.
We
all seem to think this way at some point. It was always better when things were more reasonably hyped. I thought of this myself when I was child, when video games were still being ravaged by media pundits and the majority of advertisements were always for
other things. I distinctly recall in my days of Kirby fandom when I was genuinely surprised to see the
Amazing Mirror advertisement actually TV airtime. I almost never saw ads for things I felt were actually relevant to me. This mood extended towards other games as well.
... of course, it's all a lie.
This mood of "everything was better when there was less advertisements" is itself a form of nostalgia since how we evaluate what is "a lot of advertisements" is usually relative and imprecise. I might of
thought our dear Nintendo was an underdog in a world of old powers trying to keep it down, but truth of the matter was that Nintendo was very likely overzealous in how much advertising it did. Mario alone had three Saturday morning cartoon shows, a breakfast cereal, a feature-length movie, and
that other feature length movie with the power glove that was
so bad. I only thought Nintendo wasn't advertising because I, personally, didn't actually see these ads with my own eyes.
This is the point where the issue of unnecessary nostalgia reaches a point far beyond gaming and into media in general. Jürgen Habermas was the first scholar to write about "the rise and fall of the bourgeois public sphere" as a time when media process was a pure trade that meant to assist people in public and private life. He then went on to note how the public sphere was then "corrupted" and soon divulged into early forms of tabloidism and yellow journalism in order to support commercial interests via marketing and advertising.
... and it too is completely and totally false. People went back and looked at the time of the public sphere Habermas studied. They came to the conclusion that the public sphere was pretty much corrupted from day zero.
The "golden age of reason" was no more reasonable than any other age. ... even the issue of user-generated hype still is still present, with the over-hyped trial of Henry Sacheverell in 01710 being solid evidence of that.
Things get even more complicated if you go back further than that. The success of Shakespeare's theater company was only made to fill in the holes left from the Reformation's banning of Catholic Passion Plays, where local baker shops would play out the last supper with their own goods to sample.
My point is, I know we all want to say that things were always better or more original when advertising interests weren't as involved. (And believe me, I
really want to. I can't even breathe without Adblock plus running.)
But the statement is impossible to prove. The problem of advertising against quintessence lost is historically np-complete.
Player
