I have always been and probably always will be a die-hard gamer, despite the earliest efforts of my parents to spare me such a fate. From the first moment that I saw a flickering gray rectangle moving on a black-and-white TV hooked up to the wood-paneled PONG "TV Game" console, I was utterly fascinated. I was probably four or five at the time, but even then I knew this was Something Big. Of course, I had no idea where it would eventually lead. Back in the early days of Intellivision, when a red rectangle with a half-dozen moving squares for arms and legs was considered "lifelike", I never dreamed that 25 years later people might look at high-res games with motion-capture and voice-recognition as being "gimmicky."

With every new advancement, I continue to be impressed and amazed. I also continue to be amazed at how quickly many become jaded and complacent. Of course, that is partly the fault of the hardware developers, who try to convince players that they need to be playing games with the most cutting edge graphics, sound, physics, AI, network latency, interface, you name it. So it's no wonder that the games that made people drool over screenshots a few years ago now ellicit little more than a shrug and a "Meh."

I will admit that on some level I'm no different. I always want to see what can be done next. I don't want to have to settle for less if I can help it. And the technological leaps that I may have praised a decade ago, just don't do much for me any more. For example, "Jedi Knight" might have been a great game in its day, but now the low-polygon characters look too much like cheap origami puppets for me to lose myself in the experience any more. (Incidentally, it took me years to get onboard the whole "polygonal character" bandwagon, as I was convinced they could never look as good as a 2D sprite character, or a pre-rendered 3D character. Though now real-time polygonal characters outshine even the pre-rendered ones of the past. You can hardly even call them polygonal any more.)

But every once in a while I like to stop and actively realize just how far things have come. In a sense, I meander back through my memories to a time when the games I'm playing now were barely even a "wouldn't it be cool?" idea. When a game's surround effects aren't quite up to my critical standards, I remind myself that my past self would have been in awe that the music even sounded orchestral, or that it even had more than one note at once, for that matter. (It may have been half a lifetime ago for me, but I can still remember programming the ancient PC squeaker to mimic polyphonic sound in a way that sounded more like it was being played underwater, through a fan. And now I want to complain when a game has only an hour-long score?)

And so what if those high-res, realtime 3-D rendered, fully-voiced NPC's all share the same pitch and inflection? Don't I remember when the only NPC's were little icon-sized portraits in the corner of the screen whose faces never even moved? And long before that it was just, "There is a thief standing here."

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying gamers should settle for shoddy, less-than-stellar graphics -- or other game elements -- just because they're still better than what they once were. Stagnation is never good. If gamers (and by extension game designers) had "settled", we never would have gotten to enjoy the likes of Starcraft, Half-Life, or even Oblivion. It would still just be text and vague blocky shapes, with the occasional atonal beeps thrown in. And I would never want to go back to that, ever.

But there is that whole "baby with the bathwater" thing, where we set aside (or perhaps avoid entirely) a game that doesn't catch our attention because it doesn't have the latest innovations listed in bullet-point form on its box or website. Which means not only missing out on past games whose worth transcended its technological level, but also not-so-cutting edge modern games that chose to focus more on the gameplay itself, at the cost of skimping slightly on the tech. For every person who's enjoyed the Warcraft games (whether the original RTS's or the ubiquitous MMO WoW), there's someone who opted out of them or only tried them briefly, because they were not "realistic-looking" enough.

Ironically, it seems the games that tried hardest to be bleeding-edge upon their release are the ones that seem dated later on, particularly where 3D graphics were involved. (See: most of the early FPS and racing titles of the 90's.) Whereas low-key graphics in something like the SimCity or Age of Empires series have an almost timeless quality, provided one isn't playing them FOR the graphics (which, I don't think anyone ever did. Though I will confess that their latest iterations were rather slick.) But even the glaringly dated titles like the original "Deus Ex" contain gameplay that shouldn't be missed just because they no longer qualify as eye candy.

Still, there's that inexorable push forward, giving so many games only the briefest window of opportunity in which to shine; that moment when everyone who sees it says, "Wow, there's no WAY a game could look any more awesome than this!" Only to be proved wrong a year later. Yes, it's hard to believe, but your current favorite high-def ultra-realistic pixel-shaded volumetricly-shadowed physics-enhanced life-like game? Will likely look relatively fake and unimpressive six years from now. And I have a feeling that the trend won't stop until eventually we find ourselves exiting games, looking around and thinking, "This is the 'real' world? Meh. I've seen better."