I was born in 1987. Since then, life has changed so much. There were no ACs back then and no fancy computers. Just ceiling fans, and video games like the NES were a luxury in India in the early 1990s. TVs were CRT, LCDs came much later. In 1998, I got my first PC. It had the Windows 98 OS. Before that, I had learnt computers here and there on Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Windows 98 was a true modern upgrade. Smooth edges, polished interfaces, smooth animations, etc., all used to seem very futuristic.
Life was much simpler back then. For music, there was Windows Media Player or Winamp, for movies, there was RealPlayer and Windows Media Player (VLC came only in 2001). Those retro vibes were real and brought so much joy in life. My favourite game back then was Carmageddon. It was a brutal racing game, where the more one killed NPCs by rolling over them, the more points one got. It was not age-appropriate, but nevertheless I thoroughly enjoyed playing it. Of course, the other usual suspects were Solitaire, Minesweeper, Mahjong, and other Microsoft games.
Today, literally hundreds of new games are released every week on Steam, and many of them pale into insignificance or just find a very small audience to which they get exposed. Earlier it was not the case. That was the age of consoles, and PC gaming was just picking up. Nvidia had just launched the GeForce 256 in 1999, and it was considered every gamer’s dream. There was something amazing about gaming back then.
PlayStation had also become immensely popular in the late 1990s. People used to stand in queues late at night to buy their PS. Those were truly different times. Today, everything is digitally delivered, and the physical stuff is digitally ordered. So, the shop culture is slowly becoming extinct.
Today’s kids become content by getting an iPhone or expensive Android phones, or in the name of handheld consoles, there are just two widely available options: Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck. There are others too, but the majority of gamers play on these only.
The point that I am trying to make is that earlier there was not so much divisiveness between PC gaming, console gaming, mobile gaming, and handheld gaming. Each was great in its own terms. Each had different games that catered to their respective player bases. But today, the cost of production, the cost of living, and the cost of sustaining a game are so high that often game developers and publishers plan for simultaneous releases on PC and consoles. There is also too much availability of content, which in a way is not a bad thing unless you start suffering from cognitive overload.
But the kind of disagreements that people have today in gaming are quite ridiculous. Nvidia has been a champion of gaming for decades. Still, if you open YouTube, most of the gaming content creators criticize Nvidia heavily for the price of its GPUs and for not getting the performance as expected. I find this approach to be very silly. Earlier, when people had very few options, we used to be satisfied with we had, we tried to find meaning in things, and we tried to appreciate why something had been made in a particular manner. But today, it is very different. Rage-bombing is real. No matter what Nvidia does or has done in the past, the rage seems to be there. Unsurprisingly, Nvidia’s products are awesome, and despite gaming content creators rage-bombing their GPUs, they still sell like hot cakes.
Today, Nvidia has come a long way and does not really care much about the views of gaming content creators, and rightly so. It continues to make GPUs for the gamers, and I think that is more than enough. On the one hand, gaming content creators criticize that 4K is a scam and 2K is good enough, and on the other hand, they roast Nvidia non-stop about getting fewer frames or artificially generated frames. The result is that I have stopped watching YouTube altogether. Not that anybody cares, but I find YouTube to be full of discontented people. People who make nice, soothing content suffer in this process. Citizen journalism has crossed unhealthy limits on YouTube, and that is the reason I prefer X over it. At least on X, the content is predominantly textual, and that saves a lot of headaches.
These days I am much more inclined to use X than any other platform. I have never been a Facebook fan or user. I had used Orkut, Facebook’s predecessor, two decades ago, but that was it. Since then, I have been mostly off social media. But now I am reasonably active on X. At least on X, things are pretty random, and it has that global town square vibe where anybody can say anything without the fear of being judged or being taken seriously. It kind of reminds me of the old Yahoo chat or IRC chat rooms that existed in the 90s. They were wild but fun.
Everything is evolving and changing fast, and I think humans are forgetting what it is to be human since the goalposts are shifting constantly. Actually, I do not see any problem in that. Technologically, we are moving somewhere. Some say we are moving towards the singularity, some call it a dystopia, some call it the age of abundance. I do not know. I am not a seer, and I do not want to make any predictions in this regard. I want to pretend to be an observer who is just sailing through the fabric of spacetime without understanding what it is.