Being a fairly nerdy sort, it might not surprise you to learn that I used to love playing video games as a child - still do, time permitting.
Of course, the medium has changed quite a bit since then. For one thing, video games were once 'physical items', by that I mean, you would go to a store, purchase (or have your parents purchase) a game that was stored on a cartridge, disk, or later CD.
The decline of physical media for video games is the subject of endless online debate, and I'm certainly not here to litigate the virtues of digital vs. physical distribution 1 . But at least one aspect of buying video games in the past that is now lost to time is the experience of buying a game with amazing cover art, only to take the thing home, boot it up, and find, well, the game looks a bit different from what you expected.
I suppose Marketeers at the time felt the basic graphics were not enough to sell their games, so some embellishment on the box was required 2 . But once back home and playing our newly acquired title, such blatant false advertising would be quickly forgotten, especially if it was a decent game.
The curious thing is, though, I think there was genuine appreciation for those simple graphics back then, particularly if artfully done. Indeed, today, despite the fact that there are no real technical reasons for using such rudimentary graphics, many game developers deliberate choose a retro aesthetic and often those games are a hit 3 .
Video Games vs AI
While it's nice to get nostalgic and all, you might be wondering what point all this reflection has? I suppose I mention that the seeming non-event is the gulf between box art and the actual games back in the day because the situation is rather different concerning another technical application, specifically AI.
Like video games, AI was recognised as an application of computing very early on 4 . In fact, if anything, it might be said that AI was potentially a far more important application than the early video games. But it's only in recent history that AI has commanded any real attention in the public, outside of being a popular source for speculations in Science Fiction.
I make the comparison between AI and video games as simple AI applications have been possible for decades, personally, I even wrote a very primitive Python script to imitate the style of some 17th Century poets.
Of course, the 'poetry' this script produces is quite terrible, but I'm sure such a script could be tweaked by someone with more coding knowledge to produce something slightly better without going into full LLM territory. I suspect the quality of writing such a script could generate might well be on a par with those early video games in terms of quality. And yet I don't think anyone now, or going back in time, would be as accepting towards such simple AI generated content. So, to put a finer point on it, why did AI-generated content have to get so good before it received mainstream acceptance? Or conversely, why were early video games so early embraced despiting having such incredibly primitive graphics 5 .
Modernism, an answer?
Speculatively one thought I've had is that the revolution in visual representation that occurred during the era of 'Modernism', may have made the simplistic representation of concepts and objects in early video games more acceptable to the public than had the technology emerged in an era that prized Naturalistic representations above all 6 .
I suppose the argument against this might be that Modernism applied just as much to literature as it did to the visual arts. However, I feel that Modernism did not push forward writing in quite the same way. There are extreme examples such as the word salad in Dadaism, but even the more acclaimed Eliot, Joyce, and Kafka still retain some footing in more traditional literature.
Perhaps there is a more fundamental issue in how visual and literary representation is behind all this. Somehow, that more pure and simple form was embraced more readily in the visual arts.
I don't have a definitive answer, I just think it's an intriguing question.
Footnotes
- A simple search on YouTube will bring up many results on this. I don't really want to get into this debate, but I do find it intriguing that much of the commentariat seems to have little time for digital-only releases but seems most people buying games today don't share this aversion. ↩
- Technical limitations really did have an impact on design back then, supposedly the reason Mario has a mustache was to make his face sprite clearer. They simply didn't have enough pixel to create a plausible face. A fun take on this ↩
- Admittedly many indie developers may also adopt a retro aesthetic because it makes developing games more straightforward than working out how to create a plausible 3D world with decent visual assets. However, if the buying public were not will to accept, and indeed embrace, retro graphics I don't think we'd see so many title in this genre. Even large corporate entities have used this aesthetic. ↩
- The obvious example here would be the so-called Turing Test, even when computers were still a Mathematical concept there was still some notion that they could imitate human reasoning. Indeed, neural networks as a concept date all the way back to the mid-twentieth century. ↩
- Another anecdote., supposedly when Pong first trailed in a bar in San Francisco it almost immediately broke down. Not due to a technical issue, but it's coin drawer had become so crammed with coins that the game couldn't function. ↩
- I may not be using the term Modernism in a technical correct manner here, but I think given the context the reader can understand my point. ↩
Discuss
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— Sam McDonald (@wsmcd) December 16, 2025