Hi. I'm feeling curmudgeonly and talkative, so I will write this list of opinions I have bluntly. I'll number them nicely for people to respond to if they wish to rise to the occassion and fight when a fight is offered.

1. This right now is the Golden Age of Gaming. It will be known as such for a long time.

The bubble has been long-lived, but it ain't over yet. And we have the biggest production of games - at every price point, of every genre, of every level of quality - that ever has been and my ever be.

A list of some of my favorites from this Golden Age:
Project Eternity
Elliot Quest
Dishonored
Don't Starve
Mr. Bree+
Legend of Grimrock
Batman: Arkham Asylum
The Age of Decadence

And I haven't even scratched the surface.

2. Complaints about modern games being "dumbed down" are dumb.

What mainly made old school games "smart" was design innovations that needed many iterations to make them better. Most of the changes over the years have not only been improvements, but they have been what the orginal game designers would have done if they could have. Along the way, some dumb things got done, too. Follow the quest arrow in Elder Scrolls games, for instance. But, Bethesda has always made big fun dumb games. Over the years they have just got better and better at the fun part.

And, the "dumb" stuff is now just one of many options available in this (see #1) Golden Age. Don't like Bethesda games? Great, go play Age of Decadence. Don't like Call of Duty? Fine, go play any of literally thousands of shooters available. There are so many choices of quality there is literally no reason to complain about "dumbing down" or "the sad state of games these days."

3. Not everything needs to be archived.

It is ok if not every game is preserved or playable after some time. I am not against some people or some organizations trying to create archives and little museums of playable games. But I do not think it is a cause worth very much. Most games - even most I have played and enjoyed - are ultimately disposable entertainment and not worth much effort to preserve for the future.

4. The bubble we are in will burst.

I am not enough of an economist to make a good guess about when. But games are essentially a luxury item. Right now there is a lot of money blowing around. So much that even crappy game developers without a good idea or any talent are able to make money. That will stop sometime. We will go back to a time when only a reasonable amount of games are produced per year. The prices will go back up. No more bundle trash on a weekly basis. And I predict at that time game quality will suffer greatly. Only the CODs will be produced.

5. I have always liked games. Every game I play today is better than every game I played when I was eight in 1980. Somewhere in the 80s a text game called Trinity came out and was brilliant and remains brilliant. In the late 80s and early 90s there were a bunch of crpgs that had a lot of good ideas, fun and promise. The promises were fulfilled in the last Golden Age: 1997-2004. Best time for games. Until now. I don't really know when to mark the beginning of the current Golden Age. I want to say 2011 or 2012, but I don't have a good game to posit as a marking point. Suggestions?

I love you guys. I love games. I love these pain pills.

Well, if you put it in 2007, you could include BioShock, Mass Effect, The Witcher, Assassin's Creed, and Team Fortress 2, which you probably should include.

2008 would give you King's Bounty, Okami, Valkyria Chronicles, Fallout 3, Mirror's Edge, and Prince of Persia.

2009 adds Batman: Arhkam Asylum, League of Legends, Dragon Age: Origins, Dawn of War 2, and Borderlands.

2010 gets us Starcraft 2, New Vegas, BioShock 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops, and Civ 5.

I think the Golden Age of gaming never stopped. People just choose to neglect that awesome games come out all the time.

Ah, good! that is helpful. I would put it at 2009. Arbitray, I know. But that is where I draw the line. Thanks!

Ooh, no love for Witcher on the GOG forums. Right, lads, tar and feathers. Got us one-a them sympathizers.

::suspicious stare::

I think of it more of an expansion/contraction thing rather than a bubble.

Hope your back feels better soon, misteryo!

I would disagree on now being the golden age, but I know how you feel with back pain. :/ I hope it goes away soon.

I try so hard to love that first Witcher game... You guys are being so nice! I was all hopped up on pain and pain killers, ready for a fight...

And now I'm just temporarily pain-free and speaking nicely and civilizedly even with my fellow forumites...

What a nice world!

Back and neck pain really sucks, neck I've had almost bring me to tears sometimes. I would say the golden age for games, at least for me was during the 16 bit era of consoles and about the same time for PC gaming.

I would also agree, if only because games as an expressive and artistic medium have expanded/are expanding well beyond their original traditional niche as merely toys for children.

Now they're toys for adults, too! =P

Well I hope you back feels better. IMO we get good games every year, it's just that the amount of garbage games increases at higher rate. A bit of sifting is required now a days since honest reviews are awfully tough to come by. We should be used to that though since the old gaming mags gave higher ratings to quite a few games then they deserved.

You mean another Golden Age, at least.
Also, I'm not sure if quality and innovation win over the '90s.
Surely technology and controls have improved in ~20 years, but not much game types or plots.
This is the time of remakes and reboots, after all.

. Dumbed down means made easy for casual players.
And it's usually noticeable when this happens to an established series.
Saying "Go play something else" is just a selfish comment.

. Well, that's correct for the mass of disposable mobile clones and Greenlight crap produced in these days.

. Actually, many said this already.
I guess that, at some point, the backlogs will become so big and the budgets so low, that people won't need the latest expensive titles anymore.
I'm not sure if this will stop the cheap junk, though.

. Phew, at least you recognized the previous Golden Age.
Btw, it surely starts before 1997 (e.g: Doom, Playstation1) and ends before 2004 (games already started to stale).
I'm not sure about the current GA, but certaily Steam reaching its massive popularity could be part of it.

. Good luck for the back pain :\

When you're on pain pills everything is golden. I'd recommend a second opinion, or at least wait for a moment of clarity for a more impartial sampling.

Now THIS is a discussion. I disagree with most of your points, but not on the level that they're incorrect, but that they need to be modified slightly. I'll go point-by point. I don't think so, unless you mean in terms of production. Games aren't necessarily better in terms of gameplay (some old games, such as the original Super Mario Bros., still hold up in gameplay value even today), they've just improved in terms of technological capability, thus increasing what can be done and the graphics. The only reason it's a "golden age" is that there's so many being produced at once. I'll get back to that in a moment. I concur, but I disagree with you on the reason:
The reason is that production is much easier and cheaper. It's the rise of "indie" games. Now, don't get me wrong, there are plenty of AMAZING indie games that deserve the highest of praise, but when you open the market so that literally just anybody can make a game and sell it (I'm pretty sure I don't need to point out how this can be done), it floods the market with what's commonly known as "shovelware".
Of course, I somewhat have an issue with the whole "shovelware" thing as well, since people tend to forget that you get what you pay for, but that's an entirely different topic altogether. I'm not really sure what to make of this point. What makes you say this? Or, rather, what have you seen that makes you think everything even IS being archived?
Even so, I slightly disagree, as history is history. Even archiving a crappy game can be used in the future as an example of the technological capabilities of the time. The only way that this could happen is if laws were changed to limit production to the big companies like it used to be, or otherwise economically choking out the indie market.
I think what we're going to see instead is the rise of new, huge companies springing out of indie ones. That's a matter of personal opinion. Not everybody would agree.
And if you still want to push this point. I have this lovely Steam key I'd like to give you for The Slaughtering Grounds.

Not necessarily applicable to you, but my fix for my lower back problems is simple: every now and then (like once a day, possibly towards the evening) stretching out by hanging from a pull-up bar or similar relaxed. I think there is one vertebra in my lower back that seems to click back to its place then, I literally feel and almost hear a "click" or more like a "clunk" from there when it happens. I've been doing this for many many years. Sometimes that also happens when I lie back on a firm (not too soft) mattress.

Of course keeping your abdominal muscles etc. in good shape helps too, I have been lazy there recently though. I partly agree with that, like all those mobile games, do they all necessarily need to be archived? Plus, more and more stuff simply can't be archived, due to dependence to some online service (like being a multiplayer game) etc.

However, since you say "most"... do you have a similar laissez-faire attitude to e.g. movies, or songs? It doesn't matter at all if most of that stuff is not archived for future generations? Or are movies and songs possibly somehow "more important" to be archived, than mere games? I personally don't see that much difference there, I feel there should be a general aspiration to keep stuff available for the future, even if in practice not even near everything will be archived properly. It is all part of our history.