I think games these days are missing the forest for the trees. There are an article that talks about how game developer makes people want to play games, and the science behind it.

Old games focus on game play, today game focus on a) graphics b) monitization (buy gold! pay to get it intantly! buy awesome weapon from RAH!).

But of course, game play is as tricky as mucial notation. Person a uses music notes to make great music b) person b uses music notes, but can be bad. And good games it just like good music (ala We Are Young). We cannot say we are young is good because its note A, then C#, then E, and so on and so forth. It's synergy. Combination of all game play element makes it fun.

Just look at Final Fantasy series. People keep saying FF7 is the best in the series (and I agree). To a point it now in the process of re-releasing. They didn't put remake off the table just yet, just want to see enough profit to justify it. And the only difference between FF7 and FF8 that fan was quite vocal (AFAIK) is that you need to draw magic before casting it. Just to show how fun game play is the sum of it part.

The problem with today games, is that, graphics are being focused on and not the game play. And those purely monitization (and spam all your friend) games are bad, bad, bad.

It's because of profit expectation.In the old times not everyone had a computer and it wasn't all profit-oriented,so people did it more for the sake of fun,innovation and discovery and it was more of an art than an industry I guess.I mean when I ran Crysis 2 on max on my brother's computer it looked photorealistic and everything,but it got boring after 30 minutes of playing.Serious Sam The Second Encounter however always felt extremely fun and refreshing to play and the monsters looked very..uhm defined.In Crysis 2 the enemies are so packed with details,spikes,tentacles,lights,eyes,arms that I sometimes can't tell the different types apart.I hate to admit with what Blizzard said about Diablo 2,but they were right,it was something along the lines of "We don't focus so much on high definition graphics,but on a fresh and memorable art style,so we can create a graphics that will be acceptable even in 5 years from now.".

I think sometimes the "new games don't take risks" and "new games are not innovative like the old days" arguments are overblown. Back in the Atari and NES days, there were plenty of derivative games, and a handful of innovators. The derivatives took elements from other games, added their own flavor, and perhaps updated graphics to newer hardware - basically the same process happening today. Time & memory are kind to the handful of good games, the other masses are forgotten.

but do better graphics and faster computing really make recent games more fun to play than old style NES-SNES games?

My personal answer would be yes, in general a good modern day game has more appeal to me than a good old one, and technology is one of the reasons (the other probably being the generally higher production value). Nostalgia aside, of course (I still buy the occasional item from GOG to relive my old favorites). Of course there are plenty crap games with bleeding edge graphics, but an otherwise well-designed, fun game can only be greatly enhanced by a mixture of good art design and solid modern tech.

My biggest issue with many new games today is that they tend to be a tweak on an old formula that is known to sell well. Shooters in particular seem to follow this trend the most. Older games had a certain appeal to them. I can't really say what that appeal came from. That being said, they do not really compare to some of the best new ones. In particular, Portal, Assassin's Creed, MGS4, and Skyrim are some games I would cite that are great because of great use of new technology. So in short, yes there are many games today that I believe really are better because of todays tech. The issue is that many devs use tech more for visuals than for anything else. But as the industry matures, and gamers mature, more devs will release games that make good use of tech.

I think another point we're missing is that, back when visuals were 'crappy', there was a level of abstraction involved which helped suspension of disbelief. Because the face was symbolic and undetailed, it could be anyone, and the brain filled the gaps. With an attempt of realism with newer generation graphics, we're losing this. You're seeing, as a medium, exactly what the developer had in mind. This makes it a construct of their mind rather than an abstraction, and its very hard to adapt to that, thus, feel involved.
I remember playing dragon warrior 2 and making an entire back story for Prince Cannock in my head and my hero teaching him stuff while he would catch in levels when fighting. That made grinding interestingly fun just because it was abstract.

This makes it a construct of their mind rather than an abstraction, and its very hard to adapt to that, thus, feel involved.

Really? Because I find it easy enough to immerse myself in games still and feel involved; I'd hesitate to say more so than in the past but certainly going back and playing a few games from the past (such as Deus Ex) I couldn't get into them as the quality of the graphics, compared to modern games, was just so poor to be jaring and keeps me from dropping in.

The point is there are no definitative statements which can be made here; everything depends on the person, the game, heck in their mood when they play.
(I've had games I've tried to play which one day I've disliked and then returned to a few months later and couldn't put down).

I dare say if you could provide some kinda of normalised scoring of games over the years (taken at the time of release) you'd probably find that in general the proportion of 'good' to 'bad' games at the very least remains the same - now, there might well be more in numerical terms than Back In The Day but that's by the by.

[quote name='Orymus3' timestamp='1343504313' post='4964057']
This makes it a construct of their mind rather than an abstraction, and its very hard to adapt to that, thus, feel involved.

Really? Because I find it easy enough to immerse myself in games still and feel involved; I'd hesitate to say more so than in the past but certainly going back and playing a few games from the past (such as Deus Ex) I couldn't get into them as the quality of the graphics, compared to modern games, was just so poor to be jaring and keeps me from dropping in.

The point is there are no definitative statements which can be made here; everything depends on the person, the game, heck in their mood when they play.
(I've had games I've tried to play which one day I've disliked and then returned to a few months later and couldn't put down).

I dare say if you could provide some kinda of normalised scoring of games over the years (taken at the time of release) you'd probably find that in general the proportion of 'good' to 'bad' games at the very least remains the same - now, there might well be more in numerical terms than Back In The Day but that's by the by.
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Games today use generally better game design(no more NES LOGIC), and there are lots of very good recently made games. I just feel like the biggest desire nowadays is about who has the most technologically advanced game, regardless of the game being fun or immersion, while the technology already out there can already create amazing gameplay and immersion.

Along the lines of abstraction, i've always thought it was more about what the story left out, and not graphical or sound details. Final fantasy ix has quite detailed pre-rendered backgrounds, but still is very abstract because it doesn't explain a lot of story elements(a lot of people hated that about it, but I thought it made it much more fun to fill in the holes yourself).

How much does more advanced technology really add to a game? I know minecraft and other innovative game designs could never run on older gaming consoles, but do better graphics and faster computing really make recent games more fun to play than old style NES-SNES games?

They are too different, and "fun" is too vague to really compare all of them with such a blanket. It was really difficult to explore Drama in a meaningful way on SNES/NES (not impossible). You could come up with "fun" games sure, but the breadth and depth we can reach with newer technology allows us to more fully explore and realize our ideas.

To me, it just makes games harder to make and play because of the higher production cost and tougher system requirements.
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A lot of newer technology is actually about making games easier to make. Look at Unity, CryEngine, and UE3/4. They're about making high quality games quickly/easily, not just about making high quality games.

these games with so-called HD graphics

It's so funny if they seriously use that term now.

I was already gaming at resolutions higher than todays "HD" in 1999. UT. On a CRT.

Anyway, games must be fast and snappy for me. I do play games like Skyrim and so on now and then, but then I really dedicate time for it (and need to close everything and specifically boot to Windows etc...).

If I just need a quick break, I fire up something like Doom II. Nothing beats that one for monster shooting fun (and Doom I does not have the double shotgun).

If I just need a quick break, I fire up something like Doom II. Nothing beats that one for monster shooting fun (and Doom I does not have the double shotgun).

I agree, I sometimes fire up UT1999 in the evening for a couple games, with the fast-paced music banging out the speakers it makes for some mind-blowing fun. Compare this to a modern FPS like BF3, where I need to open up battlelog, let "origin" start, pick a server through the web server browser, have the map load for five minutes, disconnect three times or more, just to join at the end of the round... ugh. Skyrim is actually not bad in this respect, as it only takes ~30 seconds to start it, for me anyway (and I haven't checked with my new SSD yet).

A metric could be designed to estimate just how quickly one can jump into the game. Perhaps a DTI (desktop-to-immersion) measure:
Minesweeper: DTI 2 seconds
UT1999: DTI 15 seconds
Skyrim: DTI 30 seconds
GTA IV: DTI 3 minutes
BF3: DTI 8 minutes
etc... of course this doesn't take into account boot time if you have to switch operating systems (but for light games there's always virtualization alternatives)

I've definitely noticed a trend where games seem to take longer and longer to start up, but this is most likely the result of laziness and poor optimization that an actual technical limitation. After all, on my computer, Just Cause 2 has - I kid you not - a 6 second DTI and is not exactly an obsolete game. I wish more attention was devoted to simple things like that, because it really makes a difference. How would "casual players" feel if Angry Birds took five minutes to load on their iPhones?? Very good point Lode.