Lots of good points being made but I don't like when it veers toward hatred of demanding games on a conceptual level. Ultrakill has lots of heart and soul and also challenges the player in order to evoke a certain experience, and that is part of the art of games.

"Hardcore" games without much story, games with leaderboards and bragging rights, aren't always being made to exclude and insult players. That stuff is fun sometimes, like Hyper Demon, a beautiful minimalist game in both concept and execution that many players will not necessarily excel at.

Petty, pedantic point perhaps but I do like a game that expects me to learn a bit to win.

The SEGA ads of the 90s were something.

I remember gaming always being seen as a "boys club" for as long as I can remember. They were thankfully pretty welcoming of me (being a brown guy and all) but girls playing games were either given the m'lady treatment or chastised for making a mistake that would get them seen as being bad at the game. Often both.

The "ethical game journalism" days, to gaters, looked like this. https://i.imgur.com/P37EDfX.jpg

I know that's an ad, not journalism, which is the point. They don't want journalism. They want hype waves and to feel bazinga about what they buy without any downer talk whatsoever.

In 1980 something, Nintendo of America made the decision to sell the Nintendo Entertainment System as a gendered toy

This would later be considered a bad idea and roundly mocked

games mechanics become watered down due to the profit motive and challenging games are fun, this whole thread feels like just contrarianism to spite a vocal minority turning being a HARDCORE GAMERRRRR into a personality trait

gamergate was unironically the mainstream debut of the alt-right and I will stand by that assertion

I think the early 2000s PS2 era was the peak of modern gaming. Colourful games, decent 3d graphics. The FPS era hadn't fully began on consoles yet.

The less said about the late 2000s, the better. That's when all the "gatekeeping, misogyny, toxic masculinity and general chuddery" really got kicked into overdrive. Every game got a sepia piss filter as well. And after that we got the blue filters which were somehow even worse.