FinishingDutch

Not exactly surprising, considering the TV’s and monitors are outpacing the contemt creators and gaming development.

A lot of gamers don’t even have GPU’s that can crank out 4K at the frame rates most monitors are capable of. So 8K won’t do much for you. And movies and regular TV? Man, I’m happy there’s 4K available.

A 4K screen will be more than most folks need right now, so buying an 8K at the moment is just wasted money. Like buying a Ferrari and only ever driving 25 mph.

Yep. As a child of the ‘80’s, life was definitely like that for the most part.

A lot of it comes down to both smartphones and the loss of ‘third spaces’ in general. I read an article in Newsweek this morning about an MIT study that analysed footage from between 1978 and 1980 and compared those same spaces today.

It shows people are now walking faster and not hanging in groups as much. There’s less eye contact and less engagement in general.

As stereotypical as it sounds, hanging kut with your friends at the mall was just what you did. We spent hours just hanging around game stores and such. It connected you with people you knew and people you didn’t. Hang out with someone in the mall for 30 minutes and you’re now friends.

The current generation is a lot different. There’s no real physical, organic hangout. And when there is, it’s now more often seen as a nuisance rather than an integral part of the social fabric.

I definitely feel like the author of that article posted here missed the mark. The 80’s were definitely radically different from today.

And let’s not forget that ‘system requirements’ were more like ‘system suggestions and challenges’. Especially when your parents bought ‘a computer’ with hardware specs that basically read ‘hard drive, memory, soundcard, CD-ROM drive’.

So when configuring things, there was some trial and error involved in figuring out what the software could attempt to configure in order to work with your specific thing. It’s not like today where us gamers pick the exact hardware down to the RGB-infused RAM.

And few things were plug and play prior to USB. You know how shitty printers are now? Try wrestling with one of those on a fucking parallel port.

Weird, right? I feel like I grew up in the perfect generation, where I started with MS-DOS and Windows ‘95. We had to KNOW how things worked in order to get games and other software running. Had to know how to install, how to fix driver issues, how to configure things, etc. Even (re)install a complete OS.

But tech these days ‘just works’. A lot of software is one click installs, with no real user interaction needed. And everything else is easily accessed on the web or a phone app. Windows itself is also much more reliable, so even that doesn’t require much knowledge.

It’s made everything available to a much wider audience, but it also means people don’t need to develop actual skills in this area. A good example is my dad. He never figured out how to do things on our Windows ‘95 PC, but he loves his iPad because it’s so easy toddlers can use it.