Today’s generations are gonna have more and more of them to look at now, so these lil Gen A’ers are just gonna be able to relive their entire life just about.
Back when I crawled out into the world (80s) pictures were a lot more work than “point phone, tap glass”. You had to carry an entire, dedicated (aka “extra” compared to your regular everyday stuff), device around, point that and hope it came out the way it looked like it did, because you wouldn’t have a clue until you got it developed, which you had to pay to have done (unless you had a special room in your house where you could pay for additional equipment to do it yourself), and then see it.
Growing up in the 90s the process hadn’t changed, and as it finally started to get somewhere in the aughts, but still needed a separate device even if you could see it immediately (or relatively immediately- those images still usually took a while to generate for a while).
All to say that photos went from just not being possible (for some types, like random selfies out funny things you see around you), to being usually only worth the effort for events (family portraits, birthday parties, vacations), to bring fairly easy but still annoying to have to carry around with you, then up to now where we can document entire days with almost zero effort at any given moment.
Babies these days are being photographed constantly, and being seen by their entire extended families within hours of existing, and having entire moments video’d all through their life.
Which just brings up how terrifying AI and capitalism is. There is almost no evidence made or preserved of a lot of my existence prior to the aughts, but now kids can just go “man, this scab on my knee is annoying af- how long has it been there now?” and have a decent chance of looking up the exact moment that happened.
But for us oldies, we get glimpses of moments or eras (like old hairstyles) and being so startled by that forgotten relic, instead of seeing the entire continuity of their hair evolution journey.
Millennials can see this evolution happen through our lifespan, a bridge between boomers and zoomers, and I always get reminded of it when you’ve like this come up.
I miss server browsers. I remember (in the days before it completely turned to trash) when Black Ops 2 went to a lobby system, even on PC. It was the last CoD I ever bought. (I was gifted mw3 later, put like 4ish hours in and never went back)
Then around that time (I forget what year that was exactly, I wanna say about 2014) every other game started doing the same thing as that generation of console started to mature and really take off in the DLC world, and the land of MTX started to become an issue, choking innovation and value. Gone were the days of just buying a game and having it, and I’m came the era of splitting it up and charging for every little piece.
Personally, I’m completely against extra skins and cosmetics being sold at all, in any way, period.
Adding a huge chunk of a new campaign or new missions or something sure, but just buying different jpegs to slap over a gun model should be highly discouraged, if not outright illegalized. (insert obligatory “fuck capitalism”)
Anyway lemme get off my soap box. I forgot I still had that rage about how the industry went in that time period.
But yeah, official servers are fine, and even having a lobby thing is fine, but server browsers are how you build community in the games. Back then clans and guilds could rent (or own) their own dedicated servers that could set their own rules and such. You would find rules and maps and gametypes you liked and just hang out there, and organically get to know the other people that frequent that niche.
Now you just get randomized groups and (at least in my experience) rarely ever run into the same people more than once. I think this promotes anger and negativity, since (again, my experience) players rarely blame themselves ever, and if they have no emotional stake in treating the person at the other end of the connection, it turns into total blame game. Somebody will then leave in a huff (often in the middle of a game) and even the even tempered, relaxed players will get upset that “is happening again”. But if you (using the royal “you” here) know at least some of them, you tend to treat them as humans more often.
It’s just a better system overall.