You all make some good points, and I thank you for the insight which your anecdote provides, Koa Zo. However I should have elaborated more about what I meant by a lack of imagination on behalf of the players of today, as I kinda got sidetracked in my first post.

So what do I mean by lack of imagination?

Take, for example, text adventure games, or as they are now known, "interactive fiction." I really liked Zork, and one of the best parts of it was the imagination you used to immerse yourself into its world. It was like an interactive book filled with action and puzzles! Yes, you are told you are outside of a white house with a picket fence and that a mailbox stands nearby, but your mind fills in all the gaps. In the power of your mind's eye, you see what the house looks like, and what the fence, the mailbox, the grass, the hills, the stream, the fields, the underground, the ravine, and more look like.

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. "Where are the graphics? Am I reading a book? Where's the action? How do I shoot things? Is this all you do?" And today's readers, like yesteryear's readers, don't have the patience for "books that you can die in" and find text adventures frustrating instead of relaxing or fun.

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!

But I guarantee you, today's gamers would have a hard time trying to interpret a lot of the graphics or they'd laugh at them. They would be startled by and cringe at the sound of the music and sound effects through the PC speaker. They'd show no patience for having to figure out what to do or where to go. "Where's the tutorial? Where do I go next? How do I get there? How do I walk? How do I stop? I just died, now what? The game didn't auto-save?! Where was the last checkpoint? There's no checkpoints?!" The idea of actually needing to read the instruction manual to get the story of the game and to learn how to play it and the need to manually save are bizarre and outlandish to them. To them, when an instruction manual is provided anymore, it is only more paper in the box to ignore.

For my final point about imagination, consider the effect of the box art, manual art, or cabinet art for a game on your younger mind. Sure, the graphics within the game might be simple little things, and not even in color in the case of Asteroids or Pong, but if you look at that sweet hand-drawn and inked artwork of the impressive star ship blasting the asteroids, your mind adds up the graphics on the screen and the artwork on the cabinet, and "2 + 2 = 4 !": as you are playing, you are imagining your little triangle is a powerful star ship with cannons blasting not at polygons which have only a few sides, but at large, dangerous asteroids. Or you read the manual and looked at the artwork for Centipede and knew that you weren't just a funny shape at the bottom of the screen, you were a cape-wearing elf wielding a magic wand to protect yourself and your people from the dangerous, "gigantic" (to a small elf) spiders and centipedes living in the mushroom forest which you called your home.

Today's gamers, however, consider anything but ultra-realism to be crud. It is like the art world of centuries past which was all caught up in realism until photography emerged. But sadly, it is even worse than that, as it is that mindset combined with the mentality and impatience of a child or teenager. So I'm afraid that games will forever be caught up in the pursuit of ultra-realism even to their own peril and downfall. It is an unwinnable arms race of diminishing returns. After all, it is better to spend a crazy amount of money to craft realistic graphics instead of losing sales over having "inferior" graphics or frustrating or exhausting players by making their minds do the work and requiring patience and perseverance.