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Except never before has such a change in game style polarized adventure gamers. You know that full well. The previous genre shifts had no such effect.
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I absolutely recognize that fact. And once again, the blame lays squarely on Nintendo's Donkey Kong-sized shoulders.
During the birth of adventure gaming until about 1985 or so, adventure games were aimed at a specific target group: middle- and upper-middle-class college-educated professional White Americans age 25-40. These were the people who could afford home computers. These were the "puzzle fanatics" at whom games were aimed. Action games were the province of video arcades, who aimed at the 13-25 age demographic and didn't give a damn about family income.
Nintendo came along and changed everything.
The platform offered a variety and technological advance previously unavailable in home "arcade" gaming. It gave the kids a way to play their arcade games at home, which parents supported wholeheartedly. ("Now I know where he is.") The cartridges allowed for in-school game exchanges. And the affordibility of the platform made it available for even lower-income families. Nintendo replaced
Gilligan's Island as the latchkey babysitter. By 1990, one in four American homes had a Nintendo system, while only one in eight had a PC.
Around 1990, PC's started to catch up. Decreasing prices and the increased use of computers in the workplace led to a gradual increase in the number of homes which had a PC. Yet all this time, PC's were vastly outnumbered by game platform systems. Around 1995, there was a sudden upsurge in the number of home PC's. (Could be Windows--could be the price drop.) By the year 2000, over half of American homes had a game platform system, while PC's had caught up to one in three homes.
It is during this same period that the kids originally raised by Nintendo became "economically viable" adult market factors. Think about it. The kid who was 10 when he got
Mario Brothers was in college and had a computer when
Doom came out. And by the year 2000,
every kid who was babysat by NES had a computer. Did they want slow-paced-make-ya-think adventure games?
Now we are dealing with the results of this economic and gaming shift. PC game publishers now actively go after not only the adults of that generation, but their kids, seeing a wide open marketplace for Platform-based gaming. Meanwhile, the gene pool keeps reproducing a fairly standard number of bright people who are drawn to the traditional "Lemme alone and lemme solve this puzzle" style of game.
It is the fact that the first (and, in some cases, second) platform-generation has now achieved a public voice and preference which is in direct opposition to those who gave birth to and wet-nursed the genre that has led to the current polarization.
I assert that 75% of all 1st- vs 3rd-person or story vs puzzle or "Myst sucks" vs "Myst rules" conflict comes down to this difference.
However..... I will admit that those on
both sides of the coin are just as adamant, argumentative and full of self-righteousness as those one the other. Nobody is "right" in these debates. But I lay the Genesis of the debates themselves directly on a doorstep in Redmond, Washington.
