The 90s was the apex of coolness in gaming, right?

[sebas]

Hyper connected internet culture has helped to stifle creativity. You need boredom and isolation to allow creativity to flourish.
How many people truly experience both in today's Always Online world?
Even a loner today is likely to be on some kind of social media platform, which means he or she will be part of a community and will thus be exposed to its influence.
People are simply too connected for originality to emerge.

Literature has definitely not suffered in the slightest though. I definitely agree that 2010 was a cornerstone (smartphone adoption, selfie camera, post-recesion economy etc.) and some real paradigm shifts happened since which we can easily see in entertainment be it music, movies or video games. For the past 15 years or so everything is a rehash, but I would rather think this is due to extreme corporate conservatism than issues with the creative individuals.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

The scifi genre has been stagnant since the 90s. It’s called “postcyberpunk” and we’ve been in it for 30 years now.

 

[sebas]

That is simply untrue. Tchaikovsky and Cixin are the first that come to mind to have written wildly creative scifi.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Where I live, before the '00s the bookstores had sci-fi and fantasy books in dedicated and separated sections. During the '00s the sci-fi section disappeared, eaten by the fantasy section, due to increased popularity of fantasy after the LotR movies. This was a period when every new writer and their dog was writing fantasy. The quality of the new fantasy books however was abysmal. Sci-fi became niche of the niche to be found mainly online, where it also changed name, becoming "speculative-fiction".

After the '10s the bookstores themselves basically disappeared, but this was another story.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

That is simply untrue. Tchaikovsky and Cixin are the first that come to mind to have written wildly creative scifi.

That’s not what I’m saying. There have always been colorful outliers like that with weird aliens and stuff (e.g. 90s children’s book series like Animorphs and My Teacher Is An Alien), but the genre at large hasn’t innovated since the advent of postcyberpunk starting in the 90s. Unless you count smartphones, and there were smartphone-like devices in scifi prior to real life.

I remember reading a lot of really wild books involving space ghosts possessing people, space zombies that make pyramid ships out of bones, space demons, boltzman brains teleporting children into fantasy novels, runaway dyson spheres that have to be saved by rediscovering the internet access codes, aliens that invaded Earth to capture the ghosts of the dead… I can’t even remember the titles of any of those and google doesn’t help… but those trippy tales aren’t remotely representative of the average scifi lit. They don’t set the standard.

Syfy Tv shows from 2010s like Dark Matter, Expanse, and Killjoys feel like they could all fit neatly into the late 90s scifi ttrpg Alternity. That’s how little has changed between publications.

 

[CowboyLou]

runaway dyson spheres that have to be saved by rediscovering the internet access codes

Blame?

 

[RaggleFraggle]

1998 Alternity is basically the last scifi ttrpg I can bring myself to like. I checked out Traveller, Cepheus, Stars Without Number, etc and I just don’t like any of them. Alternity’s premier kitchen sink space opera setting, Star*Drive, just blows all of them out of the water. It has space Genosha and space Texas, among other things. There’s no contest in my mind.

WotC canceled it so they could get the Star Wars license. Now they’re making Exodus instead of reviving it. Fuck WotC. They’re copyright trolls. They own more IPs than they know what to do with and refuse to let anyone else touch it.

You want to revive the golden age of the 90s? Start by reforming copyright so that you can revive all the canceled IPs from the era.

 

[luj1]

The 90s was the apex of coolness in gaming

 

[Silva]

Those are from 1993 and 2000. Music nowadays don't even come close.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

That is simply untrue. Tchaikovsky and Cixin are the first that come to mind to have written wildly creative scifi.

Cixin would be the person who produced a trilogy of science-fiction novels where the 2nd and 3rd are space opera and the first is a rehash of '40s SF stories such as "First Contact" by Murray Leinster and "Wanted - An Enemy" by Fritz Leiber.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

I didn’t think Cixin’s writing was good. Quite the opposite. I thought the plot was incoherent nonsense.

Where the hell did that magic razor wire come from? That doesn’t exist in reality and can’t exist.

Why don’t the alien probes just kill everyone as soon as they arrive with their alien space magic that does whatever the plot requires?

Why does the woman upset with genocidal authoritarian regimes betray humanity to another genocidal authoritarian regime?

Why are the aliens unable to understand deception even conceptually? Deception is simple to evolve because it’s so useful.

Why do the probes behave so capriciously?

Why don’t the aliens upload their minds into probes and live in space? Why don’t they send probes throughout the universe to colonize everything?

Cixin’s popularity just looks to me like a DEI hire. His writing is terrible like he took concentrated amounts of Stephen King’s shrooms, but because he’s a puppet of the Chinese communist party he gets special privileges.

The concept of the dark forest is a mildly interesting answer to the fermi paradox, but that’s all it is. It gets way too much attention. Peter Watts did pretty much the same thing years earlier in Blindsight, but gets basically no recognition for it.

 

[sebas]

Cixin would be the person who produced a trilogy of science-fiction novels where the 2nd and 3rd are space opera and the first is a rehash of '40s SF stories such as "First Contact" by Murray Leinster and "Wanted - An Enemy" by Fritz Leiber.

- A computer game about an unsolvable astrophysical problem meant to identify potential allies
- A neutron etched with the equivalent of microneutron integrated circtuits meant to sabotage key scientific progress on earth
- A main character built up through the Chinese Cultural Revolution to explain the emotional and mental dissafection with the world around
- The fucking human computer designed inside the game which functions exactly like computer multiplexers

I could go on, especially with everything from the second book onwards when Fermi's Paradox is answered so brilliantly. But in general, the books are filled to the brim with creative solutions as close to hard sci-fi as possible.

But really, if you've actually read the books and the only thing you've come out with at the end of the them is a first contact story similar to Leinster's and "space operas" then you're doing good little buddy, keep going!

 

[Nifft Batuff]

tbh Cixin seems to take any superficially cool concepts from "hard" science and randomly throw them to a wall to see what sticks and what not. And that is basically the final shape. Also, many scientific concepts that he is using are clearly not understood in their meaning, and the result is an inconsistent mess.

If you want to check some hard science fictions with cool scientific concepts (Cixin-style) I suggest to read some books by Greg Egan. Many of his books were written in the '90s, by the way.

 

[ghardy]

If you want to check some hard science fictions with cool scientific concepts (Cixin-style) I suggest to read some books by Greg Egan. Many of his books were written in the '90s, by the way.

Underscored.

 

[FritzedProcess]

This is in the Gazebo, so I'm not sure why the thread is mostly about videogames.

I'll discuss tabletop only. My answer to the original poster is "depends on what you ask".

The 1990s was the best decade for a RPG gamer to enjoy the hobby, because you could enjoy all the incredible stuff released in the 80s, and add a few cool things from the early 90s. But while the 80s was an explosion in creativity with dozens of amazing games, very different rulesets and rich, original settings, the 90s is the decade where everything went to shit and most games died.

The "hot decade" was roughly between 1983 and 1993. The rise of MtG in 93 disrupted tabletop forever, and while still some good stuff was released, it was mostly inertia, since the creative teams did not stop releasing overnight. Nearly every system declined sharply.

(...)

Some of the kids went off topic to videogames, because someone went off-topic like that and it all went downhill from there.

Back on topic, while I agree that most of the stuff I played in the 90s and still play today is from the 80s (Cyberpunk, MERP, Call of Cthulhu, Rolemaster), the 90s saw the release of Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles, Unknown Armies, Fading Suns, Deadlands, Kult, Mutant Chronicles, and the original World of Darkness. Not to forget Spanish classics like Aquelarre, Mutantes en la Sombra, and Comandos de Guerra.

Although MtG did do a number in the roleplaying clubs and conventions in my hometown, they never really recovered from that and the (in hindsight) hilarious infighting.

 

[skeletonmeister]

It was the time of cool ideas, poor execution but I take that over the current 5e/BX clones trend

 

[Jacob]

Yes, 90s is objectively the best decade for video games. I don't think it can be topped anytime soon.

I could see VR arcades becoming a thing in the future, assuming the world doesn't go full hypocondriac with covid hysteria or the world doesn't get vaporized by world war three first.

VR arcades could give 90's arcades a run for their money. Counterpoint though, only aging 90's boomers visit VR arcades in the future.

They'll charge 1500 dollars (the equivalent of 15 dollars in 2025) for 5 minutes*, making sure that only boomers can afford them.


*Just like fucking rental gokarts, damn those things are expensive

 

[FritzedProcess]

Why does the woman upset with genocidal authoritarian regimes betray humanity to another genocidal authoritarian regime?

She's a woman.

The concept of the dark forest is a mildly interesting answer to the fermi paradox, but that’s all it is. It gets way too much attention. Peter Watts did pretty much the same thing years earlier in Blindsight, but gets basically no recognition for it.

Yes, Blindight and Echopraxia were so much better than the Three-Body Problem, but the concept of unnecessary self-awareness (and many more themes and technologies) as depicted in the novels is a bit of a hard sell for mass consumption, the Three-Body Problem series is more accessible to the average Joe (sadly, these are the wages of audience-maxxing).

 

[DavidBVal]

Back on topic, while I agree that most of the stuff I played in the 90s and still play today is from the 80s (Cyberpunk, MERP, Call of Cthulhu, Rolemaster), the 90s saw the release of Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles, Unknown Armies, Fading Suns, Deadlands, Kult, Mutant Chronicles, and the original World of Darkness. Not to forget Spanish classics like Aquelarre, Mutantes en la Sombra, and Comandos de Guerra.

Of course games were still released during the 90s, especially up to 1994 but also afterwards. Small companies with good products can always manage to stay afloat. I kept playing very actively up to 97-98, and yeah, the scene in Spain was good.

 

[Hydro]

This thread was only good because of the computer games offtopic