The Golden Age of Gaming is Over If you were a kid in the 80s and 90s; then you grew up in the golden age of video games, and like the VHS and the video rental industry, it is over. You lived through an era and the era is gone. You might not have yet realized this; you may have been asking yourself in recent years, is the magic gone or is it just me, "am I just not into games anymore?" I believe the answer is yes, gaming has turned into something different and less than it once was, and no, it's not that I just don't like games anymore; it's that I'm all out of road. This subject came up in an argument with a longtime friend about the state of gaming today and he criticized how few games I play these days. There comes a day when you've played it all, when you've seen all the worlds; when the interfaces are built to play the games from the previous hardware rather than the games of tomorrow, and you realize you're just doing the same stuff again. The industry has changed. It has become self serving and insular; creating games for a rabid small group of repeat buyers. What do those gamers want? More, always more. Eight dungeons in a Legend of Zelda game aren't enough; they want twelve, no seventeen. Why even make a world-- they clearly just want a string of levels. Who has time to play these games? It's no longer a 15 hour quest; it's 40-100 hours in some games today. Accessibility and replayability have been put down in favor of games that just go on and on. The root of the change has been this belief that games are a good avenue for telling stories, but they are not. The story of a game is the story of playing the game, and developers trying to make movies of video games need to just go make movies. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BDHvnFafrQ The only place left for gamers to go is the undiscovered country of their imaginations as the player graduates to creator. Players can not only build and share levels thanks to features like Forge in Halo, but now they can build entire games on their own using ROM editors. The gamer doesnt have to be hired by Nintendo to build a (2D) Zelda game-- all they need is imagination and the design capability. The reason this is important is because, like with painting or writing, the audience has to be able to create their own games in order for the medium to ever qualify as art.