The Problem with Retro Games

There was an interesting discussion about retro games over in the TIGSource forum. I'd like to quote Chris Whitman's post about it, an opinion I strongly agree with, and then one of my own, because I feel that this is an important subject. Here's Chris's:

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Personally, I don't mind if someone decides to knock out a retro game now and then. It's nostalgic and fun, and I don't have a problem with that.

Besides the nostalgia factor, many mainstream games were, in fact, better then (although we tend to ignore the majority of SNES movie license platformers, for example). There are a variety of reasons why this was so. For one thing, if a game was focused around action and reflexes, typically you actually got to play the damn game instead of having a cutscene rammed down your throat every ten minutes.

HOWEVER:

The problem is that it has become a superstition, really. I mean, say you need rain to water your crops, so you do a dance and it rains. From then on whenever you need rain, you just do the dance. Sometimes it rains when you do the dance, so you figure that you did the dance particularly well that day and got some rain.

The endless tide of retro platformers are a bit like the rain dance. Old platform games were awesome (sometimes), so people hope that if they make something with lo-fi graphics, they'll get something great too. Except that it wasn't the lo-fi graphics that made the games great (after all, those graphics were usually cutting edge at the time), it was gameplay and fun and the desire to make a well-crafted game.

But for many people it's a crutch. Instead of analysing what makes a game 'good' (for whatever your personal definition of good is), people just adopt the entire mantle of retro platforming, taking both the good and the bad things, and end up with yet another identical game to be thrown on the enormous pile of retro crap. So no one ever expands their horizons, no one ever tries to make the best art they can muster, no one ever really does anything but make the same thing again and again, constantly hoping it will, in a manner of speaking, rain. I don't mind it when someone does a well-thought out, retro styled platformer once in a while, but I do mind it when everyone does poorly planned, hopelessly derivative retro-styled platformers all the time.

Just... game design-wise we are still depending on very basic, well-established methods of creating interest. Almost all games cast you as a little man who has to fight guys. I think that there is definitely a place for that. I enjoy action-platformers and I don't want to see them go away any time soon. However, I can't help but feel that the whole community would be better if people put more effort into branching out and trying to create things which were important and perhaps spanned at least somewhat more of the enormous gamut of human experience.

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And here's mine:

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Although it's true that it's not the low-fi graphics and scanlines that made the games good, I feel that the brain is a malleable thing, and sometimes things which are not inherently pleasurable can become inherently pleasurable through association with pleasurable things. This is a standard idea in behaviorism, with the bell creating the saliva and all that. Fetishes also work in that way. The brain's weird like that.

So I think that has also happened in many people, and that the retro game elements themselves have become inherently pleasurable in many people just through association with pleasurable games, so games which nostalgically contain retro elements and nothing else can give pleasure through association to people who have become wired that way. And I think making games which appeal to that is fairly limiting, because they often aren't pleasurable in themselves, they are mainly pleasurable because they remind people of old games. I mean some games are literally just retro graphics and sounds and have nothing else of value, and people eat it up because of pleasure by association.