Recusant said:
That would only work if everyone enjoyed the same things. Mechanics and game systems go in and out of fashion, but they almost never vanish entirely, and on the rare occasion that they do, they can always return later. Dwarf Fortress brought many old systems to the fore for people who'd never encountered them before, and also essentially created a new sub-genre; at the beginning, everyone was unused to it, and was by definition a new player. The barrier to entry started high and has really only gotten higher; has the game "aged poorly"? Of course not; it's just not especially accessible to a newcomer.
And that's just accessibility. "Enjoyable" is completely subjective. Your typical Paradox player is going to enjoy radically different things than your typical EA player, whose tastes in turn differ radically from your typical Zynga player. Now, graphics do change. That's definitely true. And it's pretty much all in one direction; things do keep getting better on that front. Sound engineering, too, keeps improving- Thief SCC showed us that those're not universal things, but it's pretty close. But that's not a function of the game, but of the player. If "old and sometimes difficult to interpret" meant "bad", no one would read Shakespeare. And as to gameplay being impeded by a game's systems, show me one example (other than Dark Souls) where that can't be immediately resolved by reading the manual.
So aside from maintaining uniformity, you haven't answered my question. What changes? What ages?
Eeeeh, not quite. Much as some may hate to admit it, things have progressed greatly in the last couple decades. 2D to 3D graphics transition, UI improvements, sound improvements, gameplay improvements... A lot of stuff has gotten a lot better.
2D to 3D graphics may at first sound like preference, but tell me where the Doom's of this generation are. Those games that kind of tried to be 3D walking simulator shooting things, but were 2D as no 3D graphics existed. That aspect of those games aged poorly.
While the old stylised sounds can be somewhat endearing, modern recreations of those same sounds often sound better, with a higher audio quality. We are also simply able to make a wider variety of sounds. Sure, Pacman sounds in early shooters may have worked because they were all there was, but put them in a modern one and we just have much higher expectations for them, and some of the older games could actually have benefited from more modern music, and thus their soundtrack has aged poorly.
Interface is easy. Hotkeys, proper scaling, better layout, easier controls, more unified controls... Things have just gotten far, far, far better.
Gameplay is kind of mixed with interface, where some just obtuse things have been properly streamlined to be more enjoyable and easier to perform, without at all changing the mechanics. The other half of it is just things that have become, well, better with time, regardless of taste. Some of the Quake games and Unreal Tournament actually hold up pretty well, and are still played today. Others... The gameplay just wasn't well made, and they're just not enjoyable to play these days.
And, as with anything, Aging well or Aging poorly is always in comparison to everything around it based on what is popularly perceived as good or bad. Why are wrinkles early on aging poorly? What if I like wrinkles? Why isn't it aging well?
As for the direct question of what is aging, the medium. As the medium of gaming grows older, we discover new techniques within it, develop new gameplay methods, new technologies, new ideas, and a lot of them get created. Some stand the test of time. For example, there's a Dune RTS game. Sure, its interface and graphics are fairly... Eh, but its gameplay has probably aged pretty alright. What's one way to tell? It essentially defined the RTS genre to this very day, with base building, resource extraction, and everything else we expect from our Age of Empires and Starcrafts. Same goes for games like the old Quake's, Doom's and otherwise. Their gameplay is often still enjoyable today, as many of the tenets of today's gameplay in those genres, is based upon the foundation created by those games. Some games have had interfaces that change the way we played those games in general, and their interfaces age well, as we still use largely the same ones today. Others didn't age so well, and don't function in nearly as enjoyable a way as we do today.
I mean honestly, most of your arguments against games aging here, could be made about people aging. I mean, wrinkles and arthritis and disease and deafness and such. That's not aging, that's just disabilities. People are born with them all the time.
Beauty and looks are entirely subjective, as are things like maturity and intelligence or wisdom. What actually ages with a human being? Even hormones are manipulatable outside of aging.
If we're looking at things that are purely unique to being old, probably one of the only ones is having travelled around the sun multiple times. Just because children are born with disabilities commonly seen in the elderly, does not mean the elderly haven't aged. Likewise, games being made with obtuse interfaces and without the advances the medium has made does not mean those techniques aren't aged, or the games that were previously made that used them.
Outside all that, I mean, come on. You understand what the phrase is referring to, and it makes sense - mechanics or other aspects of a game that existed several years ago [and are thus old mechanics/aspects, or have 'aged' or have an 'age', which literally is just how long something has been around], that are no longer seen as enjoyable or desirable today [Hence the 'poorly' part, or if they've aged well those aspects are still popular or in demand, or seen as good]. About the hardest part of it is that it treats the game as a sum of its parts, so games that have aged poorly have predominantly poorly aged aspects, while games that have aged well have predominantly well-aged aspects. Nitpicking that the age of a game doesn't actually change how it functions, kind of ignores the point. Its the most straight forward way of talking about mechanics or aspects that were good and enjoyable in their day, but no longer are. Part of that is up to taste, but so is aging poorly/well in people. Has George Clooney aged well? Some would say yes. Others would say no. Welcome to the whole "Poorly", "Well" subjective debate that is true of literally everything you will ever talk about. Pointing out it applies here doesn't really prove or disprove anything, it just seems like making a point for the sake of making a point.
