• Godort@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    Honestly, this is not an unreasonable take for 1982.

    The most recent home console would’ve been the Colecovision and the most popular arcade game would’ve been Donkey Kong.

    The NES was still 3 years away and she likely never heard of any of the more narrative PC games of the time like Adventure or Zork.

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        11 months ago

        That was such a weird take from moms of the era. I remember hearing it all the time as a kid, and I thought it was absolutely stupid. Now that I’m all grown up, I still think it’s absolutely stupid.

        • Klear
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          11 months ago

          Sounds like you learnt something.

    • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      Video games took over from pinball machines in arcades, which had been popular and making money for decades.

      I am old enough to remember seeing the first space invaders machine arriving in a pinball parlour in 1979. It was a massive hit. By 1982, arcade video games were already making serious money.

    • Knusper@feddit.de
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      11 months ago

      Yeah, these days it’s obvious that video games are the next logical step in media consumption. First we had audio. Then we had audio+video. Now we have audio+video+interaction. You can literally watch a movie inside of a video game, if you care to.

      But back then, the audio and video qualities of games weren’t yet terribly developed. You could still easily find board games, or heck, sports, that were more complex than Pac-Man and Space Invaders.
      I can definitely see that one would think, it’s a novelty and not be able to imagine how cineastic games would become, or that some even contain books worth of history lessons.

      • RIPandTERROR@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        11 months ago

        I think everyone is looking at audio + visual + interaction + immersion as the next step but no one’s quite figured it out yet.

        • Klear
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          11 months ago

          I just finished a session of Asgard’s Wrath 2 and we’re definitely getting there.

      • Meowoem
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        11 months ago

        Except the greatest educational game of all time was already ten years old and dead from dysentery by the time she was speaking.

        I think it’s more a case of her certainty coming from a lack of knowledge about the subject and the assumption that because she doesn’t know about it that it doesn’t exist.

          • Meowoem
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            11 months ago

            Oh yeah my mistake, the version we know wouldn’t come out for three more years the original text based one was ten years old

        • Knusper@feddit.de
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          11 months ago

          I mean, yeah, I am also assuming that she was no expert on the matter. We’re saying that it was an understandable opinion for a lay person or even someone who kept up with the bigger titles. It certainly wasn’t easy back then to know about all kinds of games…

    • Pat_Riot@lemmy.today
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      11 months ago

      I loved my Colecovision. It blew that boring old, one button having Atari out of the water. We played it as a family. The games were fun. New games are lost on me completely. Every one of them is too complicated to be fun.

    • aelwero@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      That crash was caused by arcades popping up everywhere. Laser titles like dragons lair and space ace were full on animated video while the 2600 had 20 yellow pixels for Indiana Jones. You had two button running on track and field, flight sticks on tron and zaxxon, sit down cabs with steering wheels or the yoke in the star wars cab competing with the iconic but boring 2600 stick.

      Wasn’t the market being flooded, it was nobody having any cash for a 2600 cartridge because we put it all in the arcade cabs ;)

  • Th4tGuyII@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    If it’s any consolation, I don’t think there’s a single significant thing in history that someone hasn’t wrongly identified as a passing fad

      • Confuzzeled@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Pshh iPhone who would want that? My n95 has a flip out keyboard much better than some stupid touchscreen phone that doesn’t even have a camera.

        • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          11 months ago

          Legit me hahaha.

          iPhone? You can’t even COPY AND PASTE? Absoltue rubbish compared to my Dream running… Lineage? I can’t remember the name of the custom ROM.

          Now I’ve been using iPhones for like a decade and love them. Dammit Apple, ya got me.

          • Klear
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            11 months ago

            Never mind iPhones, I used to think mobile phones in general were a dumb fad back in the day…

      • xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org
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        11 months ago

        Seeing how common “threads” became on Twitter, it didn’t go anywhere indeed.

    • Meowoem
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      11 months ago

      I see people now saying AI is a fad lol, people really do think they were born at the end of history.

    • Seleni@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      The older parts of my town have metal rings set into the curbs for tying up horses, because they were sure those new-fangled cars were just a fad. (Mind you, most of these neighborhoods were being built around the time the Ford Motor Company started up.)

    • NoFuckingWaynado@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I remember playing around with a hyperlinks demo on a Mac and thinking it was dumb and would never be useful for anything. About a year later the World Wide Web exploded.

  • NaoPb@eviltoast.org
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    11 months ago

    While videogames are still here, OCR technology has replaced a lot of human word processors.

  • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    Written by someone with the job title of word processor, something that did not exist 10 years before this was written.

    • mkwt@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      When I started working in 2011, we had a file share we published documents to called “word processing”. It was called that because the one file share was the only remains of the previous word processing department, which was presumably staffed by word processors.

      • jaybone@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I was a kid at the time and somehow I’m not remembering what a word processor (as a profession) actually did.

        A word processor was a software application like WordStar or WordPro, which you used to create documents.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    As late night show hosts have learned for years, the average person’s opinion is pretty fucking stupid a lot of the time.

    (I’m sure I’m not an exception.)

    • 𝕾𝖕𝖎𝖈𝖞 𝕿𝖚𝖓𝖆@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      She wasn’t too far off. The whole industry crashed in North America the following year. iirc, basically anyone could make a 2600 game. So you got hot garbage like Custer’s Revenge and ET. This opinion was published before the crash and before Nintendo entered North America and essentially saved the industry here by implementing quality standards.

      It probably would have eventually picked back up, but not for several years.

      Damn, I remember when Nintendo used to be cool.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I think the problem was a lack of foresight about the potential of the technology because of limited awareness of what was going on at the time. If you had looked over at games for computers that weren’t affected in the crash like the Apple II, you’d see that they were gaining increasing complexity. But, of course, a lot more kids had, at the very least, a pong console in their home by 1982, so this person probably was only familiar with those cheap 2600 games.

        • Beefalo@midwest.social
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          11 months ago

          Even an Atari 2600 was too expensive for the average family in 1982, about $1000 in today money. The 80s were not a great economy for most people, Reagan’s fuckery and I believe really high interest rates thanks to 70s inflation meant that even the cheapest home console was wildly unreasonable. It was 1982. Colecovision was on shelves. Television was still a very pricey home luxury in 1982, not a universal yet, so never mind the game console. The VCR wasn’t really a thing yet. People were still using radio a lot at home. You could afford radio.

          Video games looked like they were always going to cost too much money to see really mainstream adoption. That thought isn’t even wrong, people just try harder to find the $1000 for a new console now, because it offers more. Sharon thought video games looked like shit, and she was right, they did. They didn’t look exciting, they just looked like a weird side technology.

          For her, video games were a thing in a dark corner of the amusement park, they were literally Pong, and cost quarters to play, 80 cents today, for a five-minute experience or a lot less.

          Pac-Man was the current gold standard of games in 82. Did kids like it? Sure. But remember Pogs? Fidget spinners? Those snap bands for your wrist? How many things have been wildly popular with children and then into the trash they go, forever? Did Pac-Man look like something that nobody would ever grow tired of, forever? Or did it look like an excuse to sell toys? Because it very much was, they sold a lot of Pac-Man toys and merch about it, just like the 80s cartoons that faded into obscurity once they were also done selling toys.

          Sharon didn’t have a lot of evidence before her that would show any other outcome. She couldn’t see 2023 while staring down at the Pac-Man quarter muncher at the local pizza shop in 82. It’s miserable, because a proper fad and the wave of the future both look the same in the present.

          Sharon was a “word processor” in 82, she was well ahead of the curve, working with computers - or at least their precursors - when most people hadn’t even seen one. Somebody shoves a mic in your face, asks for a quote, and you give them an opinion, which haunts your fuckin ghost decades later. Maybe five years later she thinks oh, I was wrong on that, but it’s too late now.

          This is why we don’t try to predict the future any more than we have to. Today’s information is never good enough.

          • vaultdweller013
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            11 months ago

            I think it kinda depended on your interests as well, my grandfather, great uncles, and great grandfather were all guessing that games would become a big thing. My grandfather even started to program his own by 83 sadly he passed in 84, but yeah they all gave an I told you so to their wives once wolfenstein came out. But these are also men who had pinball and arcade cabnits in their dens.

      • SweatyFireBalls@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        The issue with ET, just like today, was circumstance. A bunch of suits came to a programmer with almost no time to develop the game and shoved it out the door. The reason it’s cited as the industry killer is so many people bought that trash game they lost faith. There was so much shovelware back then.

        Nintendo learned from that mistake, that’s why they had their console on lock down. If you didn’t have their blessing, you didn’t make a game on their platform. There was a lot of lawsuits towards Nintendo because of that, but their intense scrutiny is why those games were generally quality and why they revived the home console industry.

        Today we are back to where we were with the Atari, companies that don’t have the skills to develop certain games are being asked to do it, often under extreme deadlines. Look at what happened with Gollum, basically a modern day equivalent to ET imo. The reason the industry almost died is because so many people got burnt by things like ET. You would think it’s bound to happen again, and it might, but then again people still preorder stuff post disasters like no man’s and cyberpunk.

        There are a lot of mistakes that could be learned from in that era of gaming, but damn if we aren’t hellbent on repeating it.

  • Sabre363
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    11 months ago

    She’s right, we did get bored of video games. Instead we just invented countless new genres, art mediums, technologies, and entire fields of research. As well as built massive, multi-billion dollar industries just to develop, market, and sell video games.

  • Erasmus@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    My dad said this exact same thing to me in the early 2000s with the dawn of the early web. He claimed it was only a fad that would soon die away.

    Yup. Fad.

    • Pennomi@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      People are saying that about crypto and AI today.

      I mean, crypto might actually be a fad, but AI is certainly going to be as impactful as the internet was. Yes there will be booms and crashes but overall it will transform society.

      • Phen@lemmy.eco.br
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        11 months ago

        I would say crypto is more a failure than a fad. If it had been successful, people would have continued to use it.

      • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
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        11 months ago

        That’s the thing. Every big thing has been misidentified as a fad.

        But also you don’t hear about that other 10 000 things that were called a fad and ended up being a fad.

        Crypto might very well be a fad. At least only because of public misuse as an unregulated gambling market. It had potential to be great, but in my opinion, the in-between time of being a scammer’s paradise has killed it for the near future.

        There is pretty much no way “AI” is a fad. It won’t replace everything, but integrating it into CAD tools, writing tools, and multimedia tools is pretty much inevitable.

      • 0ops@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        For sure. If you’re reading this and haven’t messed around with an llm like chatgpt yet, do yourself a favor and ask it some questions or to perform some simple tasks. Like a search engine, using it is a skill you’ll need to develop, and like anything you read on the internet you need to use due diligence, because it can be wrong. But as long you are aware of its strengths and faults, imo it’s the probably the best research tool since search engines. You’re doing yourself a disservice ignoring it if you think it’s a fad

      • Erasmus@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        lol, I recall being in college in the 90s and us using, I think it was USENET groups. Email was just becoming a thing as well. Everything was very wild west as it is compared to today.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      This was a lot earlier, so I was a little more within my rights and it never technically did, but when I saw early demonstrations of HTML 1.0 websites, I said, “it’s interesting, but it will never replace Gopher.” I’d say it still counts.

    • BradleyUffner@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      To be fair, the web of that time period no longer really exists. It was replaced with something new that is almost completely profit and ad driven. From that perspective, the Internet you knew back then could be considered a fad.

  • mindbleach
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    11 months ago

    Hindsight is 20/20.

    Video games only caught on in bars a decade before this, with the Atari 2600 blowing up halfway between, and by 1982 the whole market was bleeding money. Activision split off because five guys made the games that got 60% of Atari’s sales. They defended their right to sell good software on their own. This accidentally let everyone shovel garbage onto the one machine everybody liked. Those companies quickly went under, which made everything worse, because bins full of $3 cartridges meant kids could get a stack of games for Christmas. And then be bored of them by February.

    The NES is such a weird relic (and achieved ninety percent market share) because it aggressively avoided Atari’s points of failure. Nintendo was already a century-old toy company. They were run by conservative old farts promoting rando engineers whose products succeeded. Yamauchi would read the market to name a price, and some clique led by a guy who made grabby-hands out of popsicle sticks or whatever would bend over backwards to pitch a prototype the boss could play for five minutes and nod at. In Japan that meant a battery-powered 6502 with barely enough RAM and hardwired controllers. In the US that meant being a “control deck” that took “game packs” and would only run software tested and approved by Nintendo. They basically pulled the “video games are for kids” thing out of their ass, and their absolute dominance for the next decade was nigh impossible to predict.

    For god’s sake, Nintendo themselves didn’t think Donkey Kong was anything special. This arcade cabinet called Radar Scope bombed, and they wanted to make a Popeye game but fumbled the licenses, and future company director Shigeru Miyamoto slapped together an off-brand King Kong platformer to reuse the hardware. The owners of the warehouse where they shipped them to America went nuts for it and asked them to ramp up production. One of them was Mario yes-that’s-his-namesake Segale, and the other was future Nintendo of America president Albert Einstein Howard Phillips.

    If the company had been as dysfunctional about promotion as Sega, or as arcade-focused as any other Japanese game company, Sharon might have been vindicated. At least for consoles. Home PCs were always gonna be a thing and PC games were always gonna be a thing. The UK was already buying ZX Spectrums by the truckload and teaching a generation of dorks how to make awful arcade knockoffs. Tetris hadn’t even happened yet. I doubt we’d get Commander Keen without Super Mario Bros, and then probably no Quake, no 3D cards, no GTA… but there’d still be Ultima, and Myst, and Bejeweled. Not to mention endless boring flight sims and visual novels so horny they’ll perforate your screen.

  • Immersive_Matthew
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    11 months ago

    I mean, the same thing is being said about the Metaverse today. I get the hate for the corporate dystopian ones, but it does not mean it will just fade away. The Metaverse, or really many of them as they are decentralized, are still being incubated, but they are coming and some are being very well received for those who seek them out.

    • stockRot@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Why are we calling it the metaverse when things like VR chat existed long before Meta came into the picture

      • SRo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        11 months ago

        Has nothing to do with meta/Facebook. The term was already used in snow crash in the early 90s and later in ready player one.

      • Immersive_Matthew
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        11 months ago

        What is another term for the category? There are many other terms of course, but Metaverse does indeed appear to be the one that has caught on. VR Chat is one of this category, but the category is so much bigger than social focused Metaverses, like a Metaverse Theme Park or Metaverse Mini Golf Metaverse. There are many of these things being developed, including many social focused Metaverses too, some dystopian.

    • SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      11 months ago

      VRChat is already a success, and it can be seen as an early iteration of a VR metaverse. It’s just the beginning.

      • Immersive_Matthew
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        11 months ago

        Agreed. Same with Rec Room which younger people seem to really love. There are many Metaverse’s with the big corporate ones being among the least popular.