There are no LAN parties. Conventions are more corporate now. Nobody camps out in line for a Wii.
The 90s to early 2000s was the golden age of everything because of context. The substance is almost irrelevant.
All the corporate "Bring back 1996" releases fail because they just rerelease pieces. It's like telling people that drinking alone till you puke is the same as a party.
Even more businessy software is the same way. Programmers are no longer excited about tech. They just think it's a security risk and maybe secretly respect Kackzynsy's views
Why would they innovate even if they had time? The cool thing to do is interesting algorithms, blockchains, and minimalism. Nobody wants to make a super awesome GUI app. That's too easy and the new generation of programmers looks down on how the world is GUI dependent.
Everything it tech sucks because the culture in general manages to make it suck even though the actual tech is absolutely amazing.
It is worth considering that this viewpoint is age-dependent.
I feel this way instead about the mid-eighties to the early 90s, and I personally believe that games went rapidly downhill just after Quake, until the mid-2000s casual gaming boom. Everything went 3D and the fun was beaten out of every game concept.
Speaking from a British position, I think your problem with "entertainment" generally is very specifically the manifold outcomes of the US television network syndication model.
US TV companies make too many episodes of everything, because of that model, and that feeds inevitably into a particular story development concept that involves teams of people growing and feeding an addiction.
Not so long ago, a British Prime Minister (David Cameron) told Tina Fey that he wanted a more American model in British TV -- more episodes.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-48021899
"Come and convince our showrunners that they can't just make six episodes of things. Like you guys, they should make 200 episodes," she recalled him saying.
Fey rejected the request, however, explaining that US writers were, in fact, jealous of the less-is-more British approach.
The way this works -- that everything has to have a spinoff, everything has to have a multi-episode story arc, everything has to have a universe -- is also why cinema is screwed, because it is now a feeder for this system.
So my suggestion is: watch things that don't have more than ten episodes ever. Watch films that don't have sequels. Reject syndication culture.
In particular I think indie horror games feel well-crafted and original now even if they're cheap. Can't tell you why though.
I watched an interview from the 80's-90's in which a developer discusses the process of coming up with a concept for an arcade machine. They said something like "It's like trying to create digital drugs."
> the new generation of programmers looks down on how the world is GUI dependent
I personally think we have a good mix of GUI and terminal apps right now. They both have their uses.
> That's too easy
I feel like making a GUI app is harder precisely because of the added development work.
> Programmers are no longer excited about tech
I'm less enchanted with having to know several frameworks before getting a job, rather than simply understanding a language/paradigm well and being quickly onboarded, but that's probably just a sign that I personally shouldn't be a software developer.
I've never sorted or btreed or third normal formed or a* searched something. I've never designed a new machine learning model. I couldn't implement even a toy version of AES. I've never done a GPU shader.
I just find out who has, come up with a workflow model and UI that uses it, then track down all the edge cases that need a few if statements to handle, and maybe pack and unpack some bytes for a microcontroller.
I couldn't quite be replaced by a CRUD builder tool, because I'm doing embedded stuff, and a lot of CSS theming work... but it's not unimaginable.
And every new NPM dependency feels like installing a Russian hacker’s “free library” on my computer.
They still take security seriously, but not to the point of avoiding widely trusted dependencies or trying to push back on tech in general and use more analog things
I have to admit that, after starting my own product, I’ve found my thing (doing features with a bit of backend and a bit of product management…).
Regarding the developers alienation, it is incredible how the developer advocates keep changing and newer PMs are able to sell rewrites with a straight face, ignoring what they were selling at previous BUILD, WWDC, Google IO.
Well... the golden ages (which I'd say are the mid-90s to 2010-ish) are over.
- Business software has pretty much consolidated and the existing tooling from office suites to data warehouse and workflow stuff (i.e. SAP) offers so many options that it's incredibly hard for new players to gain a foothold - you need to identify some niche, build it out well enough to offer an actual benefit and market the hell out of your idea, and maybe in 0.1% you have a chance at lucking out.
- there are a bit of open-source efforts (e.g. Thunderbird, Mozilla, LibreOffice) but they lack funding so they struggle along, mostly used by those not wanting to spend money on the above-mentioned pay products
- Utilities from file management (Winrar, Winzip, Total Commander) over media players (Winamp) to task managers have been absorbed by the operating systems. These days, particularly Apple is known for outright ripping off ideas from popular App Store apps.
- the people who made the really innovative apps in the golden age were highschool and college students. These people have since found employment at big companies, removing both the time and the ability to work on side gigs (hard to do a side gig when you're staring at a screen for 40+ hours a week, and why bother with side gigs when your employer demands copyright even over stuff you do on your own time?). Today's young people aren't interested in programming any more, they're more interested in Tiktok or to fight on the political level.
- All major OS platforms have alienated developers. Microsoft with win32 -> .net/WPF -> UWP -> WTF, Apple with Cocoa -> WTF, and Linux never got around to settle on one way of packaging applications and dependencies or on window managers or on <insert long list of forks, disagreements and other crap that happens without a central steward here>.
- it seems like the flurry of cheap or free high-quality IDEs and the consolidation (basically it's VS Code, IntelliJ or Eclipse these days) directly coincided with the end of big-corporate desktop app developments. Basically when no one pays four figures for an IDE any more because no one wants to develop for desktop, it makes sense that the others go down in price (Visual Studio/VS Code) or vanish (Borland).
- Mobile, web-based SaaS and subscription based stuff lured a part of said alienated developers with better pay and actual innovation
- ETA: Games... that's a different beast. Can't argue that there is innovation present. But most of the attention of the major actors seems to be focused on console-exclusive or other walled-garden deals, and the mobile market draws in the f2p whales. There are rare gems (e.g. Factorio) that simply would not work on a console due to a lack of a keyboard, but that's it.