Lowest common denominator. Simple as that. As games keep getting more and more popular, and everybody started chasing after the fabled "wider audience" was the reason for the change.

As Lebowski said. The people weren't smarter, there was just less of them and more dedicated to the hobby. You used to be weird when you said you were playing games back then. Nowadays, nobody bats an eye due to how mainstream it has become.

80/90's = people smart -> computers dumb

Now = people dumb -> computers smart

...

A typical troll reply to a typical troll original post.

Thanks for confirming to me what I already suspected, that being that the gog forums are no longer a place for me to frequent.

Best of luck to the helpful and informative folk who are still active here.

A lot of tutorials are time wasting sections that would only benefit the retarded and could have been worked into the game.

Other games don't even have tutorials or manuals and rely on players having to look up wikis of varying quality to find out what they are meant to do like Terraria for example.

There is that too, but we also had far less entertainment etc distractions back then. So we had to make the most of the few things we did have.

It's quite the different age we live in now ... and no going back.

Anyway, I don't think people were smarter back then ... just less in some ways and more in others. The human animal doesn't change much, just the nature and nurture conditions.

if technological advancement requires scientific innovation and that scientific innovation is the measure of if we have great intellectuals/geniuses in our time then the fact that scientific innovation being an inverse exponent means that early in mankinds existence then being a genius had ample opportunity for great world changing discoveries and now we need supercomputers just to get a vaccine on a variant of a virus we already knew about.

Think about it.
the discovery & later ratification of mathematics as a standard set of operatives was world shaking in it's impact and accessible for just about anyone at the time to of come up with.
Now we have mega corps trademarking genetics as a minefield of intellectual properties so that unless you are a computer or a similarly sized organization you have little hope of being rewarded even if you are a sole trader scientist that comes up with a slight gene mod for increasing crop resistance.
We have striven to create an economic model that favors economic whales over entrepreneurial driven individuals and simultaneously required a greater population of low skilled workers to ensure a siphoning of economic power away from the economic food chain below these whales.

No. The assumption was that in 80/90's all people, who owned PC had at least some IT background and thus wouldn't mind reading through the multi-page manual.

Today games are made for "the broadest audience possible" and thus have to cater to the lowest denominator. Including the lowest IQ. This has nothing to do with target audience IQ. It's just bad game design. Good modern games all have their tutorials being skippable or the starting level simply having floating tips on the screen that don't limit you.

Just remember the poor fella from Far Cry Blood Dragon who had to go to the tutorial on the beginning of his mission.
That's a dumb tutorial which is actually fun to play - if you don't have to repeat the mission.

Some adventure games have a nice tutorial explaining the mouse controls. For an old veteran those are very obvious, but some tutorials are nice to play anyway.

Or they teach you the game so organically that by the time you come to realize that it was a tutorial, you're facing the real challanges. Celeste, for example.

Bullshit, I've never been to Australia.

Despite there being millions upon millions more gamers than there used to be, I bet I can more easily find people who scoff at our hobby than those who share the same interest. With the gaming industry raking in the big bucks or not, gamers still represent only a small fraction of the world's population.

Plus, the games most likely known to the average non-gamer don't necessarily put gaming in the best light. I mean, what are they - WoW, a grindy MMO foerver (justly or not) tied in popular consciousness to the image of an addicted no-life, Fortnite the flashy kiddy crap associated with goofy memes and kids playing on their phones all the time, Pokemon Go and some other mobile crap? We might have looked more dignified as the deranged satanists during the D&D occult scare years :P

and there was no TikTok and rap culture to rot their tiny brains I blame cat pictures , clearly those had a role in this iq drop
yeah at least diablo 2 was good