Originally posted by bunnyhopper

Originally posted by Icewhite

Psychologists rightly point out that when we review the past we feel we have lost we tend to romanticize it. In other words, we suffer from selective memory which tends to forget what was unpleasant and remember what was good. We refer to the past as "the good old days."

You may think this is a personal problem. Interestingly enough, those who have studied personal and collective memory assert that our individual memories are highly susceptible to the social forces of the collective memory. I share a few quotes from an article on the subject to give you a sense of what is at work so that you may consider that what sticks to you may not even belong to you.

Cultural memory studies...address what Paul Ricoeur so aptly labeled “the mnemonic phenomenon,” the dialogical process through which collectivities recall the past in light of present concerns that are in part shaped by this very past that is being recalled and refashioned in the present.

According to Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945) ... [in] his late in life work On Collective Memory, published posthumously in 1950, memory is not only essentially a reconstruction of the past in light of the present, but also a process largely determined by social forces beyond the control of a single individual.

Michel Foucault ... drew attention to the phenomenon he termed countermemory. A countermemory can be fictive in nature, or it can be a form of excessive remembrance of one event at the expense of other events... .Foucault’s term has also been expanded to apply to another kind of memory, namely fictively romanticizing the past so as to promote an agenda in the present. Nostalgia, never a reliable lens on the past, can be regarded as a kind of countermemory.

Romanticizing the Past is a Conditioned Response.

In short, it's something we learn from other gamers on message boards.

Well there is that possibility and then there is also the possibility that some people simply preferred certain games which happen to have been made some time in the past.

Exactly. I, for one, started with EQ originally, and while I really enjoyed my time in the game, I can clearly see the flaws. I can also appreciate some of the systems that games like it, and others like UO, Asheron's Call, and Ryzom introduced.

It's not a matter of "rose-tinted glasses" for me, it's that many of the older games just seem genuinely of a higher production quality, from my experience anyway.

Originally posted by ObiClownobi
Because they were filled with people who were able to meaningfully interact in a online world. Now 9 out of 10 people are U NOOB LRN 2 PLY types.

:shrug:  You asked for massive, ya got massive.

Gotta accept the drawbacks.

Originally posted by echolynfan

Originally posted by wormed

Because old games were actually good. Game designers strived to make a good, challenging game; something that they enjoyed just as much as we would. Nowadays it's all about the almight dollar. Push out as much pretty aesthetics with crap gameplay, get initial sales, then hold people hostage with DLC.

I hate the state of games today. Gone are the days when games are made for people to use their brains and LEARN. It's all silver spoon fed, fisher price, garbage. :( I'm clearly jaded!

This ^

This^ x10

The old games were smaller, less featured, and had fewer visual enhancements as part of development.

This forced the developer to focus on gameplay, so of course the gameplay was better (for people who prefer gameplay over graphics).

In modern games, it seems that gameplay is just an after-thought tacked on to high resolution high poly graphics, visual effects, voice acting, cut-scenes, and storyline interaction.