Why Video Games Get ‘Old’ So Quickly

… and why we might finally be stepping off that treadmill

In 1996, this pixelated Lara Croft was a peak of high-end graphics

Earlier this week I wrote a piece about how teenagers are rediscovering Papers, Please. It’s an amazing indie game from 2013.

In the headline — and in the text — I referred to it as an “old” game.

This made several folks cock their eyebrows. A game from 2013 is… “old”? What the hell? As the game designer Alexander King joked on Twitter…

Several other folks chimed in to point out how nutty it was to call a 2013 game “old.” Plenty of even older games, like Minecraft, are doing just fine!

But as Alexander pointed out, it’s generally true that gaming culture stale-dates things quickly. We gamers often regard titles, released barely a few years ago, as last-gen. This is kind of depressing, Alexander added, because we don’t treat other media so harshly. “We don’t characterize recent movies or books or whatever as aging so rapidly (ugh, cinema envy!).” But games live and die like mayflies. Hell, consider that we refer to games from the ’80s and ’90s as “retro,” as if they were leather-and-brass steampunk airships from the Victorian era. Nobody calls Infinite Jest or The Handmaid’s Tale “retro” novels, or Sophie’s Choice a “retro” movie, even though they hail from the same time period. They’re just… novels. Film. They may be called by their genre (literary fiction, speculative fiction, film drama) but not by a moniker that specifically suggests the accumulation of dust.

So, what’s going on? Why do games seem to age so quickly?

After jawing about this with some folks on Twitter and reading a bit of academic theory, I have hypotheses for you!

So henceforth, here are some possible Reasons Why Games Age So Damn Fast:

⌛ When you’re young, a few years can seem like forever

Part of the reason I called Papers, Please “old” is that I was pondering it from the…