Hallo, and sorry for the necro.
GamerCat_ I understand you're long gone from the forum however
I am #HUNGRY for poasting there's a few comments I'd like to make.
To begin with I believe you've conflated several differing patterns in western (American? Anglophonic? will just go with American+Canadian for now) game development under this odd umbrella term of "technological fetishization". Namely, the obsession (which I believe you're using fetishism in place of) w/ "the classics" as typified by your example of Stardew Valley...
I think the guy who made this game actually is trying. He's not cynical. But that might just make it sadder. His passion project is just an ugly bloated clone of an ancient constantly iterated upon Japanese game with far more prominent western branding and marketing. A Japanese friend of mine expressed puzzlement at how he got away with such a direct copy of an existing game. My point is that this game does not look a certain way because of effective stylisation. It looks the way it does because of fetishisation. This guy is making to Harvest Moon what trannymaxxed 'Boomer Shooters' are to Doom.
...I believe shares nothing with any kind of technology and is instead closely related to the obsession with "childhood" and "nostalgia" that one can observe in Millennials (disgusting folk, I assure you) and younger gens. One can harp on about the adoption of lowpoly modeling and 2D spriting as ultimately being a cost-cutting measure, but at this point the cost cutters would use store assets anyway. The usage of these forms is about attempting to recapture the magic of games the devs
only heard about for the first time on a shitty retro youtube channel 6 months beforehand, if they've even seen footage of retro games at all likely played the crap out of as kids or teenagers. On this part, you're 100% correct, it's a fetish, and one that produces rather mediocre works. This is not helped by the bald faced plagiarism in the indie scene, where within a month to a year of some hot nostalgia-plagued "passion project" releasing about 10~20 even worse looking ripoffs have sprung up like weeds. Not even the old (pre-00s) American dev scene you hate so much was this lacking in inspiration.
A tangential note, many contemporary devs I've encountered in the wild seem far more concerned with building a personal narrative of
being a game developer than with actually making any games. Make of that what you will.
A more important point is that you also appear to be conflating the old (dead) drive to innovate that, for better or worse, defined western game development, with a particular obsession concerning "mature" entertainment. This may be due to the zombified mockery of innovation that's often used as a cheap marketing tactic by the AAA. All I mean is, there's a world of difference between the likes of John Carmack and the hacks like Peter Molyneux (ugh!), Todd Howard (ew!), and Casey Hudson (better watch your back, lying sombitch).
Also worthy of consideration are roguelikes. Games like Dwarf Fortress and CDDA are still abstract, they have stats and such, but they've also gone off the deep end in simulating aspects of reality, to the point where many consider them "not fun anymore". In fact, everyone seems to have a different opinion on what constitutes "too much" in this regard. The CDDA community is now split into "simulationist" and "game design" camps, for example.
This is what I meant about certain creators becoming fetishistic. What exactly are these guys doing at this point when they keep adding? What does this depth of simulation mean to them?
What's the harm in engineering for its own sake? Dwarf Fortress in particular is a sim that I feel is marvelously engineered, could even be considered the software equivalent of a supercar engine. Sure, the outside ain't pretty, but something that does so much so effortless ought to be marvelled at. To borrow the analogy of another esteemed (offsite) poaster, I'd sacrifice a million wannabe Cave Storys for another game of Dwarf Fortress's caliber. However, there is such a time when this kind of sophistication is uncalled for, when one too many things are added to what was a perfect artwork (think of it like straw breaking a camel's back). DDA fits the bill here, another example I'd bring up is JA2 1.13, in this case a mod of the good old JA2 that adds a dizzying amount of new under-the-hood systems, but to what end? That said, this doesn't figure into the mainstream game development landscape at all. DF, DDA, and 1.13 are edge cases who've gotten where they were due to being in perpetual development over the course of years (decades, in DF's case). 1.13 has similar results, but is more of an issue with the "aftermarket" of older games, so to speak.
Western video games fetishise technology, which runs contrary to stylisation. At the same time they are increasingly made by people who live in fear of reality. Which leads to our video games becoming something like Soviet Social Realism.
Hard and Serious depictions of boring retarded gibberish that exists as a wilful resistance to reality.
Here's your realism bro. Video games about sobbing lesbian supersoldiers because we are compelled by our
sattva to only represent pure truth, goodness, and reality.
Getting back to the matter of "mature" entertainment... To understand where this particular obsession originates, I'd like to make something I believe about the western gaming world clear out of the gate: Whether one may ascribe it to the dotcom bubble bursting, WoW and the like surging in popularity and making vidya
significantly less nerdy in the popular consciousness, or whatever else,
the nerdy types you'd ascribe any kind of technological fixation to were no longer the majority in game development by the end of the 00s. I believe this new flock of developers, largely hipsters and those who failed to enter mainstream entertainment, see realism as a tool to stave off the image of gaming as something for kids n nerds. More specifically, realism is not something to strive for in and of itself, but one of many methods needed to transmogrify video gaming into a factory of subpar primetime TV shows.
There's really nothing more to it, the creative types that get hired in AAA are scared dead of being seen as "weird" for being in the game dev business so they aggressively ape more mainstream forms of entertainment. Supporting this is the drive by these types to make every game they touch "deep" and "meaningful", in ways that clearly indicate insecurities regarding their lot in life. Tangentially, this is similar to the root of what one would call SJW/DEI writing. This is of course not the only current underlying AAA development, and it's nonexistent in the smaller classifications, but I believe it's one of the most important of them.
Zork. Rogue. Akalabeth. This all sounds like so much fun I might just abandon this discussion and go play these classics again. That or watch paint dry if I really want to get rowdy.
What about Wizardry? ...I understand that this entire discussion is founded on the claim that Japs generally made better games than us Westies ever did, but statements like these sound silly when these particular games were the foundation of
computer gaming worldwide, not just in the west. That said I believe that Japanese supremacy in the arcade and console fields is undisputed, and anyone saying otherwise is kidding themselves.
Your posts have been fairly thought provoking, as you consistently call out the malaise afflicting the absolute state of western game development. Yet it's also frustrating, as you keep getting the root causes of the malaise dead wrong. The "technological fetish" as you refer to it has been barely relevant outside of marketing bullshit since the early 00s, only cropping up again for purely hardware crazes like stereoscopic 3D, DLSS, and VR (for example) every now and then. Every aspect of the modern western gaming landscape that you've attributed to this fetish can ultimately be divorced completely from it, and instead be attributed to the follies driving whichever queer, hipster, exec, or failed writer is behind whatever examples you give.
