You can practically see how people got less educated and the attention spans dropped through the lens of video game history. Those early point and click adventure games (and others) did NOT hold your hand, and expected you to think outside the box. Then, over the next 4 decades, things slowly got more and more handholdy, because people (ALL people, not just the youngins) just aren’t quite the same as they used to be.
The average action game today has more going on in its story department than point and clicks did 30 years ago, and that’s not even accounting for games with a much larger emphasis on story like an RPG.
Baldur’s Gate 3 and the last two Legend of Zelda games are great examples of actually thinking outside the box, not thinking of explicit answers that were hard coded into old adventure games as valid answers. Those types of games back then got a reputation for “moon logic” for a reason, and I’m not sure we’re better off with games that give you a soft fail state for missing an essential item in an early area like old Sierra games.
What you might call “handholdy”, others might call “better UX” in a lot of cases, though there are certainly plenty of games that are a reaction to more guided designs; not just the above examples of Zelda and Baldur’s Gate but also the likes of Elden Ring, Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, and Outer Wilds.
People’s attention spans didn’t necessarily drop, and it’s even harder to show that people are largely less educated than they used to be, but even if both of those things were true, neither would be demonstrated by the types of video games that came out over the past 40 years. People have built entire functioning computers inside of Minecraft, and Red Dead Redemption II certainly, without question, is doing more with its story than any adventure game from the 90s or earlier.
I mean… there’s not holding your hand and then there’s the game not bothering to inform you that you’re softlocked because you failed to notice and pick up a one-pixel item four hours ago in an area you can no longer return to. I remember those old point-and-click adventure games very well, and I have very little desire to go back to those days.
You can practically see how people got less educated and the attention spans dropped through the lens of video game history. Those early point and click adventure games (and others) did NOT hold your hand, and expected you to think outside the box. Then, over the next 4 decades, things slowly got more and more handholdy, because people (ALL people, not just the youngins) just aren’t quite the same as they used to be.
On the other hand, an alternate perspective is:
I mean… there’s not holding your hand and then there’s the game not bothering to inform you that you’re softlocked because you failed to notice and pick up a one-pixel item four hours ago in an area you can no longer return to. I remember those old point-and-click adventure games very well, and I have very little desire to go back to those days.