Are long time gamers less impressed with graphics than newer gamers?

[The_vagabond7]

I think many of the older gamers, ones that have been around for longer value graphics less than those that started gaming a generation or two ago. In my experience that seems to be the case. The gamers that I know that are in their mid to late 20s or early 30s just aren't awed by how games look the same way 15-19 year olds seem to be. We'll discuss it further and get some opinions, but let me first talk about why I'm just not that impressed.

 

As somebody that's been gaming since the atari days I've seen a many a graphical revolutions in my time. I remember when having more than 16 colors on screen was vibrant, I remember "blast Processing" and "FX chips", I remember the days when 32 bit meant something and was something awesome, and 64 bit was just incredible. I remember a time when Shen mue was considered life like, almost real. I am not really impressed any more. I looked at the Crysis and Gran Turismo 5 and I really don't care. Why? Because through out all my years of gaming none of my memories of gaming are related to how a game looked. Save for one, and that's Mario 64 because that truly seemed revolutionary at the time. It wasn't because it was high quality, it was because it was new.

I remember plenty of games that were gorgeous in their day. Super Mario Brothers 3, Resident evil, Legend Of Zelda Ocarina of time, the aforementioned Shen mue. And I have lots of great memories of those games. But very few if any of those memories are of me being in awe of how gorgeous they are. It's of how they played, the stories in them, the adventures in them, the atmosphere. People say graphics draw you into their world, create that atmosphere. Ocarina of time looks terrible by todays standard, trees made of two intercrossing sections of 2d sprites, blurry textures, low poly count characters. Resident evil? How does that even create atmosphere with low detail blurry characters made of a few handfuls of polygons, laid akwardly over blurry still images. How would a game that looks so terrible be able to draw some one in? Is it relative to the time? It seemed realistic then? Reality looked more pixelated in 1998 I guess. Having watched videogames evolved since the days where alligators were just green blobs on the screen I can say without any doubt that a game with terrible graphics can suck you in just as much as a game that has state of the art graphics. It's was and is and will always be not about how a game looks but about how they play.

 

We're visual creatures by nature and like pretty things. But after having seen the good, the bad, and the ugly, one begins to see how very unimportant graphics are compared to everything else. In ten years todays sixteen year olds aren't going to care about how god awful Bioshock or MGS4 look because despite all the graphical flaws, the unrealism, they will have been sucked into that world and look back fondly not on the wall textures but on the fun they had with them. But for now it will still be "OMGZ L00k @T T3H GRAPHICS!". And when they get older and look back fondly on the beautiful games of today, the newer generation of gamers will be saying "How did you even get into this 'god of war' game? It's just to oldschool for me. I'm going to go play Tekken 12 with it's TRUE 5D GRAPHICS!!"

 Any thoughts? Any older gamers here that still salivate over bump mapping, and dynamic lighting? Any younger generation gamers that are looking forward to a bunch of innovative ugly games more than graphically amazing games? Discuss.