2024-09-22 - Why Older Is Better
It's no secret that a lot of modern media (specifically, movies/videogames) are having a decline in quality. The traditional phrase "old good, new bad" is considered a meme but I think there is some truth to it. This is largely because of the barrier for entry. To start with movies, back in the 1920s-1970s, movies were pretty hard to make. It was harder earlier in time, like the 20s vs the 70s, but there was still a significant amount of challenge even in the 70s. Largely, thinks like cameras and computers were much more primitive. If you wanted to film an intense action scene, the technology just wasn't there for hand held footage. Some ahead of their time films exist, like The Driver (1978) which has some great car chases despite being in the late 70s. But for the most part, they didn't have very great cameras, so in order to make a good film they had to be creative. If all you can do are simple pans and zooms with a camera, but you want to make an interesting film, you have to experiment with making interesting shot angles, layouts, and set designs that push the simple camera technology to it's limit. This year I went through Columbo, and it's honestly amazing how great so many of the shots look. I went through a deal of 70s filmography too and got the same results. The shots are mostly still, or simple pans/zooms, but it manages to keep your interest because they make the shot look interesting. It isn't cluttered, it's easy to tell what's going on, but it looks amazing. The average shot from a good film in the 70s looks better than the best shot in many modern films. The same principle applies to videogames. In the 70s-90s, making games was hard. You had very limited hardware, and little to no developer tools. Game developers had to invent clever ways to utilize code and hardware to push the limits of creativity. A notable example was Crash Bandicoot inventing memory pages in order to allow shoving all the content in the game on the limited 2MB memory of the PS1. When developers had limits, creativity and innovation was forced because they had no other option. For movies, I think the turning point was in the late 80s. This is when bigger blockbusters were more popular and technology had advanced more. You had the dawn of CGI and more mobile camera tech. Novel at the time, but if the spectacle of your movie is a CGI creature, then you're going to focus more on that than interesting set design. CGI itself even follows the early/later trend, but I'll talk about that later. Videogames started this trend in the mid to late 2000s but it became more noticeable in the early 2010s. These timezones are when movies and videogames started seemingly getting worse. The reason would be the barrier for entry was lowered. As the difficulty of making a movie or videogame was lowered, more low skilled people could enter the field and develop whatever they want. No longer were games made only by people with deep knowledge of how computers work, but by any team that could get their hands on dev software. Movies didn't need to be interesting because CGI and movable cameras allowed the spectacle to be shaky action or simply the new computer effects. Shaky cam action films were a direct result of this. Additionally, heavily moving shots puts less emphasis on making individual shots look good. The quality reduction because of lowered barrier for entry doesn't really apply only to movies and videogames. As I eluded to earlier it applies to basically any field that has some form of skill. The easier it is for unskilled people to enter the field and produce things, the lower quality the field will become. It seems obvious when you put it like that but thinking about it more makes so many things make sense. Music, art, games, movies, cooking, programming, carpentry - you can apply this to practically any field or hobby. When people talk about something having "soul" (or, dare I say, sovl), I think what they're referring to is this sort of implied sense of passion and effort in something. When you see an older game with amazing features, even if a modern game is strictly "better" the older game has more soul because you know a real human made that, with a high level of skill, innovating and applying themselves creatively. With something newer, who knows how much of the game is the developer, or just their tools doing half the job for them. It's why a hand made cabinet crafted by a skilled carpenter has more soul than a mass produced ikea shelf. Soul is a real, measurable phenomenon that is traced back to humans instinctually knowing when something was made with conscious effort and attention to detail, for the sake of making something good. On the other side of the coin, however, this doesn't mean humanity is doomed to a soulless future. Soul and passion still exist. In fact, the same amount exists now as it did back in the 2000s, the 90s, the 80s. If the proportion of true creatives in the population was 1% then, it's still 1% now. It's just that their work is diluted by the rest of the people who undeservingly enter the industries and release lower quality, soulless projects. People are still pushing the limits of what you can do in music, film, games, but they are doing it in different ways. When it comes to games, hardware is so good that many modern games release with memory leaks in them. But some people still make minimal games, focused on efficiency. You can find these in indie devs. The same can be said for things like music, many modern musicians still make very great pieces, it's just hidden from public view. The primary reason for this is because to make something with soul and a high level of effort and dedication - it takes a lot of time and effort, which costs money. The various public industries for these skills which cater to the masses would therefore rather take the lower quality, easier to mass produce projects and push them out because the profit margin is higher. So, naturally, you won't find these kind of things in big AAA titles (well, you can, but rarely) or $200M budget hollywood films. Instead, you find it in the people working for themselves, making their own projects on their own accord. That's more of the human spirit, not doing it for profit or for appeal, but just to make something the best you can out of a sense of pride.