Renkon

Maybe this...OK, this definitely speaks to the spaces I inhabit, IE following retro game critics rather than mainstream commentators, but I get a totally different impression from retro game discourse. The scope of what the community considers worth paying attention to has shifted away from the big hits and toward much more obscure stuff. Not just games, although that's a given, but also the systems themselves: the 3DO and especially the CD-i are the hot new thing now (imagine retro game communities seventeen years ago giving a shit about the CD-i!). Further, how they're paying attention to these systems has also shifted away from an understanding of games as objects to consume and toward all the historical bits informing that game. In short, we're working with higher quality information.

Although all that being said, I can't shake the feeling that a lot of retro game discourse today is still fundamentally enthusiast in nature, and this places some important limits on what the discourse can acknowledge, much less accomplish. Unfortunately this is where my thinking gets pretty fuzzy. All I can do is vaguely gesture at the trends that have defined retro games for the past few years: speculation, CRT televisions becoming a prized commodity, the overall shift in how retro media in general functions, etc.