I wouldn't say gaming was more innocent a few decades ago.

There was a lot of stigma surrounding video games back in the 90's/00's. It was the peak of "Do video games make kids more violent?" There were games that were banned from being sold, games that actually had an A rating from the ESRB, games that caused controversy and outcries from parental groups, etc.

The best era in gaming and so many new ideas and IPs back then. Tech advanced so fast. Sonic 1 on Genesis to Sonic Adventure is 7 years apart. Mario World to Mario 64 just 5 years. The industry as a whole was still young then, Growing. Shareware was a thing. Expansion packs were just that. Smaller teams and even sometimes 1 person would program a game. The industry is now a corporate monster. Risk-averse. Cares nothing about creativity. Of course, any industry is always in to make money. Today it's about bleeding the customer dry and taking ownership away. Industry wants total control.

Gamers were younger back them

1. While there is still a lot of stigma around video games (and especially violent or sexually graphic games), it probably peaked in the early 90s to mid-2000s. The ESRB was formed in 1994 due to controversies with violence in games.
2. I suppose it makes sense that games were less political back then. I would chalk that up to games being less cinematic. There are still political themes and ideas in Final Fantasy VII, government/military sim games, etc.
3. E-rated games were way more popular, especially until the late 90s. So I guess part of the era you're talking about is more "innocent".

Idk about "innocent" but I would say there were definitely more family friendly games and platformer mascots as a whole because that's what the gaming industry was really known for. Nintendo had such a large influence because they owned an insane portion of the market. I think at one point in the early 90s, Nintendo's marketshare was 80% of the gaming industry? Granted, it was still young, but that's why video games were considered to be for kids and why every mom considered every console a "Nintendo" but once Sega and especially PlayStation kicked the door down by the mid 90s, the stigma that video games were for kids slowly started to wither away. Once franchises like Mortal Kombat, DOOM, Resident Evil, Quake, Diablo, Grand Theft Auto, and Half-Life started releasing, as well as becoming popular, it became more apparent to developers that the industry was growing and gamers want to play new things.

I would say that was the era where there was a lot more risk taking and true attempts to be more creative with new kinds of games, but by the late 90s and especially early 2000's that "innocence" was gone. Especially when online became more prevalent. I still remember killing someone in Unreal Tournament (still the best FPS game ever imo) and you had the ability to emote on top of where you killed them and that was in early 2000 in Quake you literally saw pieces of flesh flying all over the place that you called blowing someone to "gibs"

No.

The reason we have the ESRB is because Congress held hearings on video game violence in the early 90s and told the industry, "Either you regulate yourselves, or we will regulate you, and you won't like it." Nintendo chose a Hays Code/Comics Authority Code approach to game content, which resulted in them losing big time on Mortal Kombat I, which was one of the biggest third-party games of the 16-bit era. 

Beyond video games, as someone who was born in the late 1970s, it was not a more innocent time. The first big news story I can recall in my life was Rock Hudson getting liver cancer and then finding out his cancer was caused by AIDS, and I also remember Iran/Contra and Bork's nomination pretty well. We also had a raging crack cocaine epidemic and historically high rates of violent crime to deal with back then. 

I would dare say no for one simple reason: the people who create videogames have always had similar visions. We're able to more fully realize the vision developers had for games back then. In fact, I have no doubt developers in the 80s were imagining the future of gaming being what we see now as "normal".

Thus, I would say nothing's really changed from a visionary standpoint: games have always covered a wide variety of genres and themes simply because it's a creative industrial sector. Unlike, say, TVs or smartphones, videogames are created from the mind and then materialized into something we interact with rather than being some piece of tech (the tech is what drives it).

Case-in-point: many people don't realize how many of today's hot political issues were already being addressed in far, FAR older MCU comics.  I always run into the few daft ones that hate the "woke" stuff in MCU, only to have more MCU enthusiastic people remind them that the exact theme occurred in comics well before our current era.  Videogames haven't really changed, just the ability to manifest them far closer to the way their creators imagine them.

Games and game developers had a lot more freedom of expression back then. Games weren't more innocent. Leisure Suit Larry taught me about condoms, Police quest had plenty 'political' stuff and the original Civilization included global warming, next to being about politics through and through.

You had plenty soft porn games, some hardcore as well. Vinyl Goddess from Mars, Leather Goddess from Phobos


Astrotit was a hit back then


Wolfenstein 3D was not innocent either. And there were tons of political sims


Today's games have to be innocent as there's always a vocal minority crying wolf whenever a game isn't PC through and through.

Ehh, I prefer the good old FAQ / Walkthroughs downloaded from a BBS near you over the endless jabbering game play videos of today. There are still some walkthroughs but you have to wade through ads, spread over a million pages for clicks.

You didn't have to worry about spoiler alerts either if you didn't finish a game the day it came out lol.

Nah, the internet did make everything worse. But at least we can complain about it on the internet :)