If you could, would you exchange your golden age with the current era as your new golden age?

Uhh...Is this a "would you rather have been born later" question? My answer has generally been "yes" though less so now. I'm glad I lived through the 90s, which were the calmest and most geopolitically carefree era for the United States in living memory, rather than the stressful and miserable era we're in today.

I can't really separate video games from that context. Games today are better than they were in 1995, but it wouldn't really make sense to imagine a 1995 world with today's games. And some of the things that make games good today (Internet, power of computers) have detrimental effects on society too (I think social media is, overall, kind of a bad thing.)

I just can't separate games from their era like that, and video games are far from the most important thing about any given era.

@bigsocrates: It's clearly only about gaming. I didn't relate gaming to politics or anything serious when I was a kid. Way to drag down a fun light topic.

Wait, so are you essentially asking if I'd rather be 7 years old now or 7 years old back in 1993?

I suppose I'd still pick 1993. It's honestly so hard to imagine me existing as a kid in 2017.

Nah. I look around and most kids are playing Clash Royale and Minecraft on their phones these days. I'll keep my memories of Final Fantasy, Mario, Zelda, Metroid and a slew of Sega Master System (my first console) IPs that I still love and no one cares much about anymore (Space Harrier, Phantasy Star, Alex Kidd, Shinobi) thank you very much. Those games had heart. I'll give, Minecraft has some heart, but Clash Royale and its ilk can fuck right off.

@beachthunder: Sure, though I think of my golden age of gaming as when I was in middle school, not that I don't think the times before then fondly.

"Would you prefer 1995 if it had Playstation 4s" doesn't really make sense as a question because it wouldn't be 1995 anymore. Gaming is political, just like everything else. Sometimes explicitly so (Metal Gear Solid, This War of Mine) and sometimes not (minority representation, who the 'bad guys' are.)

And it all intersects with other things going on at the time. If games were better when I was a kid I might have done less other stuff than I enjoyed. Or I might have gotten into game design, which I flirted with but decided not to invest in because the stories being told back then were too simple.

You can't just yank media out of its historical/personal context. And sometimes even the historical context of the media is necessary. Legend of Zelda Beath of the Wild is a great game, but it can't exist outside the context of the rest of the Zelda series. It couldn't have been made in 1995.

Hell no, in short, one thing I adore is the progress I've seen since the early days.

Naw, I've enjoyed games in every era regardless, I wouldn't give up my late 90s "golden era." Plus I can recall when early 3D games looked AMAZING and can appreciate them more than most whippersnappers!

I'm not sure what "my golden age" means, that sounds like being a senior citizen lol but sounds like you're talking more about puberty. I was born in 88, so I consider the mid 90s to last gen to be when I played the most and liked video games as my top form of entertainment. Now video games are going downhill, so it seems like that was the perfect time, since before the early/mid 90's doesn't interest me and the present/future don't look that great when it comes to video games, so I wouldn't change anything.

Of course not. The games I played when I was 6-16 years old were scientifically the best. I know everyone says that about everything from when they were that young, but in my case it's actually true.

Source: https://pastebin.com/c6DTumGJ

I can't answer that since when I played the most I also got into emulation and older PC games and they are all part of the same age even though they covered a span of 20 years back then. I'd like that to keep going forward.

As someone who has gamed since Atari 2600/ NES days

Now is the true Golden Age. Vinny is right about this.

You've got all the new stuff, game prices have never been cheaper and almost all the things that have come before are readily accessible.

I wouldn't go back.

Lootboxes alone disqualify today from being the golden age overall, but it's absolutely the golden age for the indie game.

No way. I got to witness the birth of video games. I know it's nostalgia but I doubt it will get any cooler than that for me.

Nah I like my golden age. This gen still doesn't feel to me like it's got started tbh.

Hell no, the early 90's arcade days was magical and 2001-2007 for me had the best games I don't even consider this era the golden age for gaming to much rushed games and not enough new IP'S and way to many titles that should be dead by now aka COD ect.. VR is the only thing that makes this era feel special and exciting.To me this generation hasn't even had any ground breaking new IP'S it just depressing but I still love gaming just disappointed with this era.

That's a...weird question, for a variety of reasons other people here have already aired.

I'm definitely of the mind that seeing the medium progress has been so rewarding that I wouldn't trade what I had for a different experience. The last decade in gaming has been so absurdly good that I'm still somewhat in a state of stunned disbelief. Things are so good now that most take it for granted, but if I hadn't seen what things were like before this, I would probably be doing the same. If anything, I would rather be born earlier.

I voted "no" as well. I get where the question is coming from: irrespective of all the time and space shenanigans posters have brought up, people tend to latch onto a certain generation of consoles / games as their "core golden age of content." Some people swear the PS2 / Xbox / Gamecube era was the best, and some people swear that the Super Nintendo and Genesis era was the best for content, and so on. What if a person thought that the PS2 era was the best era but grew up with Super Nintendo era content? Would he or she switch out the games (and only the games) if it were possible?

I'm probably an outlier, but I started with a regular ol' Nintendo when I was three years old and didn't hit my gaming stride until around the PS2 era... when I fell really deep down ye olde rabbit hole. My golden age of gaming is everything from 1998 (Half Life) up to the present, and thus I wouldn't trade it for the Nintendo 64, Atari, or Commodore. :-P It's been a great couple decades to be a fan of video games, and I hope it keeps going strong. It's been a hoot.

Man, people seem to have a really long period of golden age. Maybe I'm just jaded but I see my golden as a shorter peak period and everything before and since is great but not as quite.

If the games of today were out in the 80's or early 90's then I would gladly trade my formative years for this. I might be in the minority here, but I think that 99% of games from back-in-the-day were shite and even a bad game from today is almost certainly better than all but the best games from that era.

Mmmnope. I feel like my appreciation of modern games is enhanced by having started with the relatively primitive DOS era and having seen everything in between. We've come a loooong way since then, but I feel like there's something to be said for the bigger picture, nostalgia and all that aside. Besides, the sheer unchecked *weirdness* of 90s gaming (especially in the early CD-ROM era) had a strong formative impact on who I am in general. Not to overstate it, but in a number of ways, I wouldn't be the me that I am if I grew up on modern gaming, even if they existed in an otherwise unaltered 90s.

Not many generations get to see the rise of a new medium, after all, and with the accelerated pace that games have evolved from the equivalents of "silent shorts" to "major Hollywood blockbusters", it's just a really cool thing to have witnessed the majority of.

It's hard to say. On one hand, yes the tech is capable of much more impressive stuff, and the tools and production processes have been "democratized" in such a way that a more diverse group of people can bring their own methodologies to bear on making games better in ways that were normally neglected back then, and devs benefit from decades of extra insight into the study of the craft on so many dimensions, and there are just plain more people working both in the industry in its entirety and on the average game you end up playing.

But also, for some reason I don't feel like this era is fertile grounds for a game that could, say, dethrone the original Deus Ex as the top system shooter. I think there's something about the process of modern AAA development and how it kinda sands away the rough edges, that kinda makes the big releases lose their "teeth". Like, there's this homogenization to more recent games, devs seem to bend over backwards to hit all the bulletpoints on some AAA experience checklist of player expectations, or to fit every game into the same "framing", rather than letting the actual thing they're creating come into life in its totality and take full control and steamroll the player. I don't know, I don't think I have the right words for this. Maybe it needs little more explanation than "big-budget games designed by committee and focus testing in a AAA environment tend to turn out a little boring and shit."

That said, I think there are recent games where devs have allowed their ideas to run rampant, player be damned, to the benefit of the final product. Breath of the Wild is hard to ignore here. I guess what makes it hard for me to crown this generation is that those games aren't hitting in a majority of the genres that I care about, so it's hard to make the case that this era overshadows my personal golden age, which is probably something like the ~1997-2002 era.

The only thing I'll say, is I wish I could've introduced more (good) games of the era to myself when I was young. I'm sure we all would say yes to the opportunity for that. My "golden age" could have been a lot more golden if I knew certain games existed back then.

Juxtapose back in say, the 90's, to now, and it's a hell of a lot easier to procure and research games: even as a kid. For example, I had an N64. I played games like Mario, Pokemon, and a few other things like Banjo. Here's something simple I wish I could have changed.

1: I didn't know about memory cards, so I started every game over constantly. (Never even made it out of the first section of Banjo Kazooie...) 2: I never played either of the Zelda games. Two little hints to my kid self and I would have had a much different experience with the system. At this point, I don't really know if I'm on topic, so I'll end it with this. I would exchange my golden age to now as long as I was more present of mind to find and play more of the greats of the era.