this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2025
1138 points (97.5% liked)
RetroGaming
24463 readers
1655 users here now
Vintage gaming community.
Rules:
- Be kind.
- No spam or soliciting for money.
- No racism or other bigotry allowed.
- Obviously nothing illegal.
If you see these please report them.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Counterpoint:
The reason they will be out of touch is that they will have better impulse control and better spending habits than kids raised on modern games with their FOMO MTX and gacha bullshit.
So basically, actual 'nerds' are rasing another generation of 'nerds', except this time, nerds 2.0 will probably actually be more socially intelligent than the brain dead zombies being raised on fornite, roblox and tiktok, who have negative attention spans and cannot fathom the concept of doing any actual thought-work, when chatgpt can just do their homework for them.
They'll also be more tech savvy, like being exposed to or having to learn at least some of how emulation works, which kinda de facto makes you understand things like a file structure, which an increasing number of kids (now adults too) raised on modern mobile UIs... have no clue about.
Oh, they'll also likely just be generally more literate.
Apples and oranges.
'90s equivalent to "them goshdang tiktoks and fortnites" isn't Half-Life and Ocarina of Time, it's Television. The Simpsons or DBZ. Or those awful "classic" animated shows from the '80s that were designed from the ground up to be toy ads. "Impulse control" my ass, most of y'all were glued up to the TV screen like a moth to a lamp and only got consumption impulses out of it. Calling young people "brain dead zombies" is such an "old man yells at cloud" moment, look at yourself.
There's more culture than ever being created now thanks to the incredibly lower barrier to entry. There are more incredible microtransaction-less indie games made in the last 10 years than the exhaustive library of most gaming consoles back then. Celeste, Outer Wilds, Expedition 33, Baldur's Gate 3, Tunic...
The existence of slop is a constant across generations, and clinging to an idealized past is such a foolish endeavor, and will cause you to lose out on so much relevant cultural discourse happening right now. How many classic video games from the '90s might a queer kid growing up nowadays look up to? How many?? How many had, oh, I don't know, a goddamn female protagonist? And don't say that Samus counts. What a lame-ass culture to let our daughters grow up in.
I mean, as a 90s kid, and tech dork... yeah, I largely did drop TV almost entirely, in favor of console and pc gaming, and exploring the early public internet on a 56k modem.
I would imagine most tech dorks of the era did as well?
Like, as soon as I learned how to block ads on the internet, then later on youtube, as well as uh, obtain audio visual media without cost... I did that regularly, never looked back, began to actually not be able to stand TV due to ads everywhere all the time.
And yep, I am still calling anyone who watches ads for anything, anyone who buys into incredibly exploitative business models that waste your time, money, or both, yep, I've been calling them idiot consumer zombies since the 90s, consistently.
You are right that there are more non bs indie games now. That is great! That is good.
Are more games more diverse now?
Yes! Also good.
... But I've had basically the same opinions on all this since the 90s, I am not rembering an idealized past, I am one of the nerds thats been this way the whole damn time.
They call Gen Z the digital native generation, but this omits the ubernerd Millenials such as myself (and others from other generations) who forged the way, who were early adopters from a young age, who were digital visionaries that forged the path before the ecosystems got to be more user friendly, more accessible, more mainstream.
Like uh, without potentially doxxing myself, of those indie games you list?
Yeah, I know a few people on one of those game's dev teams, personally, met them online when I was first like like 13, back when multiplayer games had server browsers with private custom servers, some of those also had their own websites and forums, all we had for voice comms was ventrilo... I met these people way back, have regularly voice chatted and gamed with them for... 20 years?
I myself have been modding (as in making mods) for that long as well, I literally taught myself how to code so that I could do it, before I got out of high school, before any high school offered coding classes, before Adobe bought out Macromedia, and flash games on Newgrounds were all the rage.
Not to try to gatekeep nerddom with some kind of official checklist you have to measure up against, but I think you are considerably underestimating the potential nerdiness of a lot of really dedicated nerds from that era, and thus writing them off as 'old men yelling at clouds'... when we've been yelling at those same clouds since we were kids, then we went on to actually implement the changes we deemed necessary, as best as we could when up against the corporate and financial behemoths constructed by Boomers.
My public high school in Southern California had programming class in the late 1970's. Nerds been nerding for a bit. Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta yell at some clouds, now where did I leave my onion belt...
You're not kidding about file structure. I haven't got a fucking clue how to do it with phones. Every thing is just "in here somewhere" and it'll pray the search feature can find it when I eventually locate the file browser.
I miss my PC
Due to circumstances, I've had to emulate more on phones. You very much can figure out the file structure so long at its Android (and 9 times out of 10 shit is just in the download folder). I swear my wife's iPhone is a little black box, though.
IIRC modern iOS ships with a file manager. The black box used to be even worse!
iPhone bitch here
Yeah we absolutely have a file manager!
And where might I find the files saved by an application?
“Files”
Most apps aren't visible there on an iPad. When connected to a computer other folders are visible instead but I was never able to get all of them.
Do yourself a favor and install a FOSS file manager system, if you can / its not too much trouble on your particular phone.
Basicslly every phone OS goes out of their way to make their particular file browsing app batcrap overcomplicated and unintuitive if you want to do anything other than exactly what they want you do do.
Which is usually sync everything on your phone to their cloud and your account.
I am running a sort of jerry rigged, half baked, de goodled android, ... basically I have torn out, replaced or disabled everything I can without root, but left in play store and core g services so i can actually still use it for common apps... done the best I can to lock down everything to its bare minimim privelege set, never use a big ole shared account for anything, everything is a separate, old school email account.
You're in a virtualized container that only exposes some directories, also those directories are mostly hidden from you, also within this container you generally don't have any permissions to them, and also every application completely obfuscates it's folder access via some file access API.
It's crazy to me how hard consumers got fucked right from the start on phone software and how normalized we are to it.
It's mainly done for security reasons, but yes it is not the most friendly way of doing things.
I agree with you, though… it’s definitely good for the general population as a whole. Tech savvy peeps should have the option to…be, but most folks should not have root access.
If it was primarily done for security then it was a massive fucking failure. But I believe that security was a secondary concern.
What reason do you think? Also what makes you think it was a failure? Seems pretty successful to me.
The app store and permission model hasn't stopped malicious code from making it onto users devices. So if security was the concern, I'd say that's a failure. But I think the primary concern was control. Control by manufacturers (And eventually, thereby states) of what people see and do on their phone. Make sure they have to pay for access to features. Easily surveil what they do.
Security is very often the excuse for control.
Your confusing different parts of the system here, and showing a lack of understanding of the security and privacy concepts involved.
Stopping malicious apps is not the point of the permissions model or of the file structure. It's meant to restrict what malicious apps can do, not prevent them from being installed. It applies to side loaded apps just as much as ones from the play store. Malicious code ending up on users devices does not make that system a failure, as that was never the aim.
As for spying, the permissions model makes that harder as apps can't just access all the files made by the other apps. These kinds of mechanisms also exist on desktop Linux via flatpak and snapcraft for similar reasons. Mandatory and discretionary access control is important for both security and privacy. The two are not at odds here, they are in fact very much aligned.
The app store part is separate and not at all what was being discussed. That is meant to stop malicious apps from getting onto devices. In the case of Apple this is definitely also about control, but android has always allowed third party apps and sideloading.
Google's own services and Apple's own services are part of the OS and potentially have access to things others don't so can very much engage in spying. That could be said of any Android manufacturer with their own ROM. You can do whatever you want if you made the ROM, android permissions model be damned.
Sorry, I thought you were the kind of person who could handle a little casual disagreement. I don't mind that you think security was the primary purpose of phone OS app land, and I definitely wouldn't presume you arrived at that assessment from ignorance as you're a stranger who I don't know and that would be both foolish and needlessly insulting. But everything I've watched phone companies do over the past 20 years demonstrates to me that a desire for control was the main intent. You don't have to agree, in fact I think it's silly to spend all day debating it because it really is a subjective matter.
What makes you think I can't handle disagreement? If If think someone is using shaky reasoning I am allowed to call them out, and use my actual knowledge on the subject to defend my point.
I am not saying google or apple have the best of intentions. They don't and that's why I use GrapheneOS.
Sandboxing is generally a good thing so long as it's done in a transparent way that can be controlled by the user. Hence the popularity of flatpaks, AppArmor and why GrapheneOS has even stricter sandboxing options than stock android. Walled garden ecosystems aren't good, and neither is spying. Apple is guilty of both of those, with google being guilty of the latter. You're painting all of these distinct things with the same brush even though they are basically cross purposes to each other. Different mechanisms are made for different reasons. The current state of mobile is the result of more than one decision made with different aims in mind. I am not saying that security is the primary consideration for all of these, certainly telemetry wasn't added for security reasons. Just that it's not as simple as you want to think. Nuances exist.
This is not subjective either. Someone somewhere will know the actual reasons these decisions were made. Even though we don't know the exact thought process behind them, we can still reason about what these mechanisms do and are useful for. Android itself is open source and these mechanisms are reviewed by other security researchers. You're just saying that to get out of the leg work of actually understanding the nuts and bolts of this stuff and what is and isn't supporting the end user.
In a certain way, probably me neither. I use ls, df, md5sum, cp, mv, rsync, tar, gzip, gpg, vim, touch and mkdir in Termux (terminal emulator for Android). For example, say I am replacing MP3 for FLAC. I really like to keep the timestamps of when I added the specific song, but I can't find any better way than
touch -r oldfile.mp3 newfile.flacBut I also use FX File explorer for certain tasks, as it thankfully keeps timestamps. I absolutely hate how moving photos in Google Photos updates the modified timestamp to the date of when the file was moved. Why?
And I also have an ancient version of ES File explorer, version 4.0.2.3. Before it enshittified.
But I am not sure whatever that is installable from within the device, or it's old enough to require
adb install --bypass-low-target-sdk-block app.apklike some other old apps I use.Anyway, I have no idea what's going on with iPhones and files, or whether that's a non-existent concept there.
Yeah the nerds usually find themselves in very powerful social circles if they survive school. Circles of emotionally mature experts with strong careers.
Kids' needs are of course very important, but abandoning engaging hobbies in favor of some phantom desire to fit in is dumb.
Never discount the sheer volume of text and dialog contained in the average mid-90s JRPG!
4 CDs of text to be read!! Though I'll gladly replay the 2 CDs of Chrono Cross for the beautiful graphics, music and characters.