I'm 32 btw, and I don't consider myself "old" like millennials often exaggerate....32 is still young, but time creeps along for all people and there is one thing that when I see it, it makes me have sort of an odd dread feeling.
People will post memes of like "this show is now X amount of years old...feel old yet?"
And that stuff never does. But the one thing that makes me go "that can't be right....that must be a glitch...it can't be that old" is those rare times I come across a Youtube video that was uploaded near the beginning, like a video from 2007 or something and the video will say "uploaded 15 years ago, or 16 years ago"
That one hits me in the gut every time. I remember in middle school Youtube being a new thing and it doesn't feel like the type of thing that is half my lifetime ago..It feels such a modern, part of this crap society that when I stumble across videos that were 16 years ago....I don't know...it gives me a similar feeling like when you watch a black mirror episode...there's something dystopian feeling about it.
someone recently talked to me about how they were in middle school when they played dragon age origins and are so happy to be playing the new one! (she also thinks she's a man and is writing a college thesis on queer theory, so it tracks).
I was at the tail end of college when dragon age origins came out. heck, I was a sophomore in college when Mass Effect 3 dropped.
What really gets me is that there seems to be hardly any nostalgia for A Link to the Past or the SNES era final fantasy games on the internet nowadays. 10 years ago that's all anyone talked about when they discussed their golden age of gaming.
The graphics arms race is not only over, but has reversed course. Multiplayer games are primarily done via match made multiplayer lobbies. in game chat has been replaced by discord servers. kids growing up today will never experience the sheer awe a video games moving from pixels to polygon, from polygons to believable humanoid shapes. most of them will never experience the joys of a sleepover with split screen multiplayer.
we grew up in a world of rapid change, and have it entered a world of stagnation, yet time moves ever onward.
I don't even know what I'm saying at this point, just a bunch of old 30+-year-old rambling I guess
Agreed about the gaming landscape thing.
Every time I hear some soy filled typical gen z type youtuber talk about how this "Wii game was their childhood game", I die a little inside.
Old youtube gaming culture was amazing.
Even though my first console was a genesis, the youtube gaming "scene" up until around 2012 or so gave me so much gaming history and knowledge and I still discover and emulate older gems from before I was born, in large part because of youtube being that way back then.