Nostalgia Goggles

We were discussing about how people romanticize things of the past to be much better than they actually were. I'm well aware that my "nostalgia goggles" are the thickest rose tinted lenses around, but I like to believe I have credible reasons for loving the things I do. Video games serve as a good example of how newer isn't always better. 2D sprite animated gameplay obviously lacks any true grasp of realism, and so it engaged players through story, gameplay, and theming. When a well made game, in terms of the playable experience, is visually lacking it requires the players to bridge the gap through imagination. Where a character onscreen may simply execute its basic slash animation, a player knows the experience is artificial and imagines what kind of dynamic attack their hero would use.

This is an experience ultimately lost in the world of three dimensional graphics. The artificial reality tries its hardest to appear believable, but characters are still programmed with set patterns of movement. Video games no make such an effort to look real, but cannot fully succeed. Since games no longer have the stronger visual disassociation that sprite games did, the experience doesn't bring me to a place where I openly accept the games obviously artificial world. This makes digital movement programmed patterns stand out more glaringly. What happened to letting a player's imagination do some of the work? I'm no longer experiencing the immersion on my own terms.