Is There Not Enough of a Player's Imagination Involved in Games Today?

[Gameguy]

But today's gamers, they wouldn't want to play these text adventures because... they wouldn't even think of them as being video games.

I'm a bit confused by the point you're trying to make. Are you complaining about current modern games themselves, or are you complaining about the gamers of today? If you're complaining about the gamers, I don't think your examples make sense as text adventures fell out of favour with most gamers by the late 1980's, it's at least 25 years ago.

Or let's even jump ahead slightly to early graphical adventure games. They still had text-parser interfaces, but they began to have graphics. Things like Mystery House, and later on, King's Quest. They gave you even more of a skeleton to hang your imagination on and build out what was happening in the world and to figure out what things are, because while they had graphics, they were simple graphics due to the low processing power of the computers of then. This is where your mind filled in the gaps around that basic framework to grow the graphics into a transportative experience and grow the game itself into a grandiose adventure!

Again, you're focusing on events from over 25 years ago. People continued to focus on graphical advancement and just looked to the most recent games for the most impressive experience possible at the time. Very few people looked back longing for a simpler experience, nostalgia hadn't taken hold of very many people at that time. Basically, most gamers of that time period have the same mentality as gamers today. Of collectors who I've heard talk about games being better when they were more basic and relied more on imagination, they were talking about the Atari 2600 and early arcade or computer games, complaining about games NES era and newer. This is a different issue than just why most recent and current generation games are lousy. Personally I feel games reached their peak of excellence during the mid 80's through late 90's.

Seeing a single group of twenty-somethings prefer to play billiards or darts as a social activity among friends, and then jumping to the conclusion that it's because "modern gamers" don't like arcade games as a whole seems a bit out of touch. It couldn't possibly be that these people weren't into video games and were just trying to find something to do as a group social activity, one that was boring as a group experience.

There's a difference between a serious enthusiast and a general consumer, the people you're describing are general consumers. They're acting the same way as they've always been, and they're the ones we've been buying games from at yard sales for the last few decades.