Comment by zwischenzug | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zwischenzug | Hacker News Reader

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This touches on something I've (and many others) have felt throughout my life, not just since the advent of LLMs.

To take a simple example: I grew up with computer games in the '80s where there were no 'physics engines' or frameworks for building games. As a result, each game was an expression of the author's personality somehow. Fast forward to the noughties, games bored me as they mostly looked and felt the same, or maybe felt like 3-5 different games all packaged differently.

Another example: going abroad on holiday in Europe (I'm from London) used to be a relatively wild, vibrant experience, filled with unexpected differences and challenges (not all positive). There were no McDonalds or Starbucks and the shops were filled with unfamiliar products and foods. Now everywhere in Europe feels the same when I visit, especially with smartphone in hand.

And films went from wildly different to one another to what now feels like 'arty' and 'CGI' being the two choices.

This article continues that into the realm of ideas, or idea production. Everywhere you go looks and feels familiar.

Or am I just getting old?

> Or am I just getting old?

Perhaps? But I think this is more a case of just not seeking things out.

Music is as vibrant and diverse as ever, but not if you're only looking at the top charts run by the music industry.

Same deal with games, there's more experimentation and interesting concepts in gaming than ever before, but not from the AAA studios.

Now I can't speak for how you vacation, but I've had wonderfully different experiences between Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Rome, Paris, Montpellier, London, Amsterdam, Oslo, and Florence. I just don't go to the starbucks and instead wander around a bit, optionally picking from a few hit destinations if I feel like it. But also, it's not like this was created for nothing: https://www.itchyfeetcomic.com/2018/10/omnimappus-europeus.h...

On cities, I guess my point is that I didn't have to seek out new experiences. Simply going there guaranteed new experiences. I spent a lot of time in Vienna growing up and everything was different. I literally couldn't have a familiar experience even if I'd wanted to. In fact, I remember having to spend lots of money and travelling a long way to find a specialised shop to get a familiar food item (baked beans) to relieve the homesickness.

I don't think people under a certain age can really appreciate how different it was.

> On cities, I guess my point is that I didn't have to seek out new experiences.

Neither have I. Literally just wandering around. The one exception specifically was Prague's Old Town district having several of the same tourist trap shops. But all you have to do is walk around a minute outside of the most touristy area of Old Town and it's all gone. Not to mention all the awesome, different cafes and shops along other landmarks.

> Same deal with games, there's more experimentation and interesting concepts in gaming than ever before, but not from the AAA studios.

I just wanted to add on to this, I wouldn't really classify modern games as "lower quality" than those of the 80s. I'm really not a fan of AAA games, I think the last one I played was Elden Ring, but I would never suggest that they're actively low quality. Uncompelling? Absolutely. But I also have spent a lot of time playing games from the 80s. Silver and golden age CRPGs, random simulators, DOS games that catch my eye. "Quality" isn't the first thing that jumps to my mind. Often they're ugly, terribly balanced, buggy, rife with all sorts of issues in any category you can think of. Games have come a very, very long way. 2400 AD (1988) and Champions of Krynn (1990) are relatively speaking highly polished masterpieces. They're still kusoge, honestly. I have very little experience with the consoles of that era, because pretty much nothing I see even remotely catches my eye.

>Perhaps? But I think this is more a case of just not seeking things out

"If you went for deep dives and looked at fringe stuff there's still variety" is totally compatible with "the world is way more honogenized".

There have always been fringe unique voices, but that's beside the point. The world is not defined by the long tail, but by the top 20% most listened/visited areas/games played/movies watched/etc, that all now look the same.

>Music is as vibrant and diverse as ever, but not if you're only looking at the top charts run by the music industry"

So it's not "as vibrant and diverse as ever" then, since the same "top charts" were much more varied in the past, and they reflect what most people listen to, not just what some music nerds seek.

>Same deal with games, there's more experimentation and interesting concepts in gaming than ever before, but not from the AAA studios.

"There is more experimentation and interesting concepts in gaming than ever before" just not in the games most people play. Well, used to be ALSO in the games most people play.

>Now I can't speak for how you vacation, but I've had wonderfully different experiences between Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Rome, Paris, Montpellier, London, Amsterdam, Oslo, and Florence. I just don't go to the starbucks and instead wander around a bit, optionally picking from a few hit destinations if I feel like it.

Yes, if you go out of your way you can find some places in Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Rome, Paris, Montpellier, London, Amsterdam, Oslo, and Florence that are not all alike. Meanwhile, you could go anywhere in those cities 30 years ago and you'd find uniquely different stuff, whereas now all major streets and areas have the same globo cafe and globo shops.

Yeah that's the wrong takeaway you have :)

Alex Murrell has a great piece on this: https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average

The generic city one makes no sense. Does the author want each city to invent a new physics? Not only are there quite a few different looking buildings in each of the cities, but given the constraints of not have unlimited funds, surely one can understand that many columns of steel, concrete, and glass will look like columns of steel, concrete, and glass from afar.

Cities could look like https://www.arcosanti.org/

Cities could look like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_67

Cities could look like https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-blue-city-of-jodhpur...

Those are urban areas with a dense grouping of relatively small and lower priced construction. The Alex Murrell link has pictures of dense groupings of enormous buildings with very high priced construction.

The first two look interesting, the last looks like a huge slum. They all look like bad places to live. IMO, of course.

That's funny - to me, Jodhpur is most immediately appealing of the three. It reminds me of the medinas I visited in Fez and Marrakesh: overwhelming at first, as a visitor, but compelling, and full of life. I'd rather live in a thriving urban place like that, all human-scale and pedestrian, than some sprawling, soulless, car-dependent suburb like the ones a majority of North Americans inhabit.

I'll stick to games and movies, as I believe both have been moving in a similar direction, becoming more of an object to be consumed, rather than to be experienced. I've thought about this in two ways: it's either that (a) when fields are fresh, creators explore orthogonal concepts and fit to what performs best relatively quickly, or (b) the available idea space just isn't that large by itself, and novelty wears off after you watch some number of movies.

Both games and movies are predictable in the sense that we know what to expect, and they have been largely standardized. Games have common keybinding schemes, as well as user experience mechanics: how jumping feels, when we expect to autosave, what the UI/minimap symbols mean, etc. When it comes to movies, I find myself no longer turning away from the screen before gruesome scenes, because I expect in advance that they won't show it, depending on the mood of the movie. I also find that you can often predict which dialogue lines were meant as foreshadowing for a plot twist coming later. This standardization is intentional in the sense that people are more likely to consume something they are familiar with, and more likely to enjoy it if they can passively engage with it.

It's common nowadays to pay $20 for a game, play it for a few hours, and forget about it. Or, turn on a random Netflix show on the TV to pass time in the evening. Quite likely that a month later you won't reminisce about either of these experiences, but you probably didn't have high expectations either way. I think 'consuming' a travel trip is similar in the sense that it has very familiar tropes no matter where you go, but more implicitly resulting from market forces rather than intentional design from a creator.

For this reason, I'll always love indie games. Anyone who finds themselves bored with moder AAA gaming should really go play some of the 2000s and 2010s indie darlings. Here, I'll even give you a list of games I've been playing

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, Bit. Trip, Cave Story, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Cuphead, Downwell, Fez, Hollow Knight, Limbo, Octodad: Dadliest Catch, Papers, Please, Proteus, Risk of Rain, Rogue Legacy, Shovel Knight, Spelunky, Stardew Valley, Super Meat Boy, Terraria, VA-11 Hall-A, VVVVVV

Can you tell I own a PS Vita?

Honestly the indie darlings are only getting better.

I've been playing a survival crafting game lately called Abiotic Factor and it is blowing me away with how creative and fresh it is, even in the fairly crowded "survival craft" genre

Getting old for sure, but also globalization of cultures and ideas contribute as well.

>Or am I just getting old?

Obviously not, since 20-somethings also dislike that and express the same things openly, which they didn't in the past.

Also obviously not, since one can just see it by comparing e.g. 10 pictures of NY or Chicago or LA vs 10 pictures of Berlin or London or Barcelona cafes from 1980s and from 2020s, and the latter all look alike. It's also been studied (even academically) and has several names: airport aesthetic, international style, placelessness, global monoculture, airspace aesthetic (air as in airbnb), etc.

"placelessness" was coined the year after I was born! So if it's not 'just age', then it's been going on a long time.

It’s human nature to pattern-match experiences. As the number of experiences grows, more fit into something seen before. So, yes, we’re just getting old.

No, global capitalism and franchise agglomeration have resulted in a flattening of experience. Big global cities all around the world look more and more like each other, with the same franchises and extremely similar offerings everywhere. Young people are having a more homogenized, globalized experience as they grow up online. Teenagers around the world watching the same media and existing in the same shared media-space.

No, culture and the means of production went global. Bespoke only makes sense when you can’t get an acceptable good at a decent price. That goes for food, building materials and physics engines. Different will only be found in fetishistic disneylands from now on.

Or how about corporate memphis, rounded corners, etc.

there is also the fact those tools increased the number of offerings but the quality did not improve.

It's crazy to hear someone think games in the 80s were more creative than they are today. That's taking nostalgia to a whole new level! Indy games today are amazing. When you lower barriers the ratio of good to bad probably tilts more towards bad, but the absolute number of good still increases.

There's going to be reams of AI slop (already is), but I bet the amount of amazing games will also (more slowly) increase due to AI tools. The trick is in how well we can filter.

I think we're in the early stages and being overwhelmed by low quality production. We'll find ways to filter, and find some real bangers.

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