What happened to gaming?

To me it sounds more like the social media algorithms put you into the "gaming tech" corner so that's all you see. Indie gaming is huge and not at all about graphics. Look at the currently popular games on Steam and a ton of them are technologically very basic.
- Also don't forget retro games.
  Even new games can be run on midrange hardware if you don't crank up the settings.
  People want big numbers and companies watch to sell the latest stuff. No one gives a platform for advocating low budgets, cheaper hardware and patient gaming.
- Exactly. My feeling is more the opposite of what OP is saying. Gameplay and innovation is king. Just not in AAA games.
- This is the answer. Lots of great stuff going in games right now.

I definitely think you're in a bubble of AAA games. This is literally the middle of an indie game renaissance.
Get off of consoles, and get a midrange gaming PC.

Valheim was one of the best selling games and is still a huge success. Indies are getting better and more popular to the point that even big companies like Nexon are indiewashing their studio and pretending that Dave the Diver is an indie game with pixel art instead of a work of one of the biggest publishers there is. In my experience most of the gamers nowadays are people that grew up on minecraft, terraria or probably more likely today - roblox.
So basically no, I don't think so. Maybe big studios want you to believe that and it might be true for a casual FIFA or CoD gamer but for anyone else, there are more options than ever and the supply of good smaller simpler games is just overwhelming, the days are too short to even keep track of them anymore.
- I didn't actually know about Dave the Driver being a big publisher until just now. I felt that game was kinda under-developed for how hyper it was and now I'm even more disappointed.
  It only has like 6 major areas and the levels didn't have that much variety. Plus the side content is fairly under polished. I enjoyed it for the first 60ish percent but was kinda forcing myself to finish it by the end.
  
  That's pretty telling when a big company can't even make a convincing imitation of a low budget game.

That's just triple A games, I think. Indie games are varied and don't necessarily focus on graphics

Nothing happened. It is the same as always. There was no time, when graphics (and audio) weren't the hottest shit to talk about. We did that in the 90s in ads, game magazines and in the schoolyard. And the people before us did the same. The buzzwords back then were different but that's all.
Maybe stop watching youtubers, if that annoys you? Idk.

There are a lot of phenomenal indie games. There also are still a couple of really good AAA games, but AAA gaming isn't what it used to mean. In fact I'd be careful with AAA by default unless reviews state that the game is actually good. Ubisoft even tried to establish an "AAAA quality" game with Skulls & Bones or how it's called and it's a total flop.
The real quality these days lies in indie games or (mostly) independent gaming studios. I think it's kind of safe at this point to just assume by default that Bethesda, Microsoft, EA, Activision-Blizzard and so on simply cannot produce actual good games anymore (there may be some exceptions, but again, wait for independent reviews, and unless it was independently verified, don't trust them to produce a good game).
Another problem is the sheer mass of games flooding the market, because it means that true gems aren't found so easily. But they exist. There's no shortage of great games, you just have to look harder, and look in the right places.
- The rabbit hole of looking harder and being amazed by what exists will probably never end if persons keep looking (till they become proficient enough to be the ones making those things).

You may as well have typed this in 2009 or 2015.
It used to be that people argued that it's worth getting the new game console because "better graphics". The console wars hasn't gone anywhere, it's just expanded.
In any case, in regards to just installing a game and playing it, no, not really. When I was playing games in college in 2012 it was still a time when you would open a game and go to the settings menu to adjust settings.
Sometimes it was just turning off motion blur, but there was always settings to change to try to reach a stable 60FPS.
Nothing changed, it just expanded. Now instead of 60FPS it's a variable 60-240FPS. Instead of just 720p-1080p resolution, unless it's portable, it's 1080p minimum otherwise variable up to 4k. Instead of "maxing out" we now have raytracing which pushes software further than our hardware is capable.
These aren't bad things, they're just now 1) slightly marketed, 2) more well known in the social sphere. There isn't anything stopping you from opening up the game and going right away, and there's nothing stopping other people from wondering about frame timings and other technical details.
Sure, focusing on the little things like that can take away from the wider experience, but people pursue things for different reasons. When I got Cyberpunk 2077 I knew that there were issues under the hood, but my experience with the game at launch was also pretty much perfect because I was focused on different things. I personally don't think a dip here and there is worth fretting over, but some people it ruins the game for them. Other people just like knowing that they're taking full advantage of their hardware, hence figuring out the utilization of their components.
There's one last aspect not mentioned. Architectures. 10 years ago games would just boot up and run... But what about games from 10 years before then? Most players not on consoles were having to do weird CPU timing shenanigans to be able to boot up a game from (now 20) years ago. We're in the same boat now with emulation, which while emulation is faring better, X360/PS3 generation games that had PC ports are starting to have issues on modern Windows. Even just 5 or 6 years ago games like Sleeping Dogs wouldn't play nice on modern PC's, so there's a whole extra aspect of tinkering on PC that hasn't even been touched on.
All this to say, we are in the same boat we've always been in. The only difference is that social media now has more knowledge about these aspects of gaming so it's being focused on more.
The one thing I do agree with though is that this is all part of software development. Making users need better hardware, intentional or not, is pretty crazy. The fact that consoles themselves now have Quality vs Performance modes is also crazy. But, I will never say no to more options. I actually think it's wrong that the console version of games often are missing settings adjustments, when the PC counterpart has full control. I understand when it's to keep performance at an acceptable level, but it can be annoying.
- Always turn off motion blur and DoF if you can.

Balatro is nominated for game of the year. Some other games from the past year you could check out: animal well, nine sols.
- I've never had Balatro crash or do anything weird on me, either.
  Don’t you miss the days when you just installed the game and just played it?
  I don't miss them because they're still here!
  
  I don't miss them because they're still here!
  Exactly

Ignore all the that, it's marketing. A lot of cool indies that have better story and mechanics than AAA games, you just have to look beyond your usual places

Everything you said is just telling us what You've been focusing on. If you don't want to focus on resolution, frame rates, etc, then don't.
There are hundreds and hundreds of great games easily available. Play them. Ive been living the days of just installing a game and playing it for decades. And I'll continue to do so with no problem.

The bubble of AAA gaming and reviews/benchmarks definitely has that kind of thing going on. But you can really just ignore that subset entirely and have so many good games to play from smaller studios and devs.
It's not really a new thing, I remember when Crysis came out and it was all about the graphics and hardware to run it the fastest.

this makes me nostalgic... people were saying this about fallout 3.
- To be faaaaaaaaaaaiiiiir, a lot of that was tied up in the switch from overhead isometric view to first-person view.
  Fallout 1/2 didn't focus on graphics, they were in many ways point-and-click adventures. A lot of things you had to hover over for "flavor text" and every once in a while something only four pixels wide exists that you need to notice.
  So the gameplay actually actively eschewed graphics in favor of things like flavor text and reading.
  Further, the switch to first person broke the SPECIAL system, because how to you even manage a gun skill in a first person shooter without it feeling absurd? It made sense in isometric, even if it was often frustrating to miss an enemy when you had a 79% chance to shoot them in the balls. Putting that in a first person when you mag dump into someone standing right in front of you and half your shots feels a lot less realistic, and can quickly become frustrating in a more fast-paced first-person-shooter environment. The SPECIAL system feels absolutely slapped on as an afterthought in Fallout 3.
  Also, the writing in Fallout 3 was that shitty Bethesda writing. The writing was just subpar compared to the prior two installments. Especially the fucking stupid ass end of the game.
  I'd say a lot of those complaints were driven more by the perspective switch than anything else.
  
  it was just an example :P
  
  Calm down.
- People were saying this about the first goddamn Playstation

Nope, because I don’t give one shit about those kinds of games. Nintendo and indie games have never cared about graphics and performance. I haven’t owned a PlayStation since the PS2, and I’ve never owned an Xbox. Crazy how if your only console is a Nintendo then you never really care about that stuff. I do have a gaming pc but still play mostly indie games.
- Nintendo is a proper shout out.
  A Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom aren't the prettiest games but they have two very big deals about them.
  Stylization. Games with a specific art style tend to age better than ones with ultra realistic art styles. Team Fortress 2 aged better than a lot of things because it leaned into the Pixar-cartoony style. ABotW and TotK both have their own unique style that will age incredibly well.
  Instead of the focus being graphics, the gameplay is the core loop. Tears of the Kingdom especially deserves accolades for how well the entire system of combining weapons and items just works. Who cares about the graphics, the crazy shit you do in the game isn't causing the game to crash or fall to pieces. The game expected this, it was built to handle this, and this is proof that it was way more important to the developers than the graphics.

It's hype for marketing. Our society is based on consumption and over spending. The GPU and CPU manufactures want us to keep spending money to have the latest and greatest.

Tbh... no, i don't feel like we did. Those things have always been discussed on the mainstream ever since gaming became a thing. It mostly sounds like you have an algorithm/internet bubble problem, maybe it's time to curate your feeds more to cater to your tastes? If you're interested in a nice gaming podcast that doesn't focus on graphics i can very much recommend "Gaming in the Wild", it's very chill and covers a variety of games, i like the way he describes things.

What you're describing is not exactly gaming, but a different hobby entirely which is sometimes referred to as benchmarking. I've dabbled in it myself for some games, and the goal isn't to experience and talk about the game as it is, but to figure out how to benchmark, best settings for performance and all that jazz.
Discussions about specific games for their merits are still very much alive on the internet though, you usually have to go to reddit and look for a dedicated subreddit for the game you're interested in or their itch/discord if it's a small indie game.

Graphics have never been a priority for me, they're more like an inevitable side effect of technology advancing. Luckily there is no shortage of good old games, and a lot of smaller studios are making amazing titles with older art styles / less demanding specs.

Depends on what games you're playing and where/who you're discussing gaming with.

there's plenty of "ugly" games here's some I've played recently that came out this year:
UFO 50: A collection of new games in the style (mechanically and visually) of the 8bit games. 8 bit graphics
Balatro: A GOTY nominee, it's a roguelike that is extremely loosely based on poker. modern pixel art style static images
Children of the sun: a puzzle game where you are a sniper that bends and deflects bullets to kill whole rooms of people with 1 bullet. Graphics are pretty imo but not advanced.
Echo Point Nova: a movement focused shooter. games plays on a potato. There is technically a a ray tracing option, but I think it's more of a future proofing thing/a personal interest of the dev.

Gaming is alive and well. It's just the media you are consuming.

all I come across on social media regarding gaming is about resolution, ray tracing, DLSS/FSR, frame rates, frame time, CPU and GPU untilization, and all of that stuff,
That's because those are measurable factors in a game, things that can be objectively measured. "Fun" and "playability" though are subjective, so a journalist has a harder time telling you if a game will work for you.

Try stardew valley, Celeste, and others indie games.
Very lovely in term of visual too.
TW :LGBTQIA+, anti patriarch, propaganda 😂😅
- What does TW stand for?
  
  Thats an alert, meaning "trigger warning",
  Usually you do use it to alert, before a click. Alert this content is gore, hard, etc

I don't really relate as I typically linger two or more years behind the cutting edge games and tech so by the time I get it my hardware can easily run it and I can actually just install the game and play.
That and all tge good games float to the top of the pile in that time so I rarely end up spending money on something I don't enjoy.
- I just buy them in the steam sale and never play them

I feel it's a bit like any hobby. You'd see casual film enjoyers and then those who refuse to watch unless it's a bluray on their 4k Dolby Vision TV with 1000 nits OLED brightness. There are some who just enjoy listening to music on their airpod knockoffs by streaming on YouTube music and then there are those who buy $500 headphones with high quality gold plated aux wire and a custom DAC and use some obscure format to really enjoy music. There are some who enjoy team sports and then there are those who know personal routine of each player and the wetness of the grass or the year of the ball's manufacturing and its impact on throw.
It's a spectrum.
- Stalker 2 had bugs on launch yet it easily sold 1 million copies. Black Myth Wukong uses frame gen to achieve 60 fps on PS5 and otherwise it locks to 45 fps, yet it has broken all records. Elden Ring is still a stuttery mess on PC and barely hits 60 fps on consoles, even the $700 one, yet it's beloved.
  These people aren't the ones talking about resolutions and frame rates on X, but just playing the damn game in millions.
  Just like millions use sub par TV settings and stream music or don't have much clue about team sports but still have a great time.
  
  Elden Ring is still a stuttery mess on PC and barely hits 60 fps on consoles, even the $700 one, yet it's beloved.
  I have an old ass PC and a PS5 with the game on both and they run smooth as shit unless you're using raytracing, which literally doesn't even change the visuals in the game; it just makes it slower.
  Stalker 2 is a busted mess. The performance issues have been fixed mostly after 3 patches, but the game itself shits itself once you get to a certain story mission. Literally nothing works beyond that point. The A-Life system does not work, scripted events are all jacked up, IDK if anyone else is getting this but every now and then I have my secondary weapon replaced with a random other weapon that I didn't even have in my inventory, sound effects don't play properly, the hud completely disappears, and so many more things that make me glad I'm only playing through GamePass and didn't actually buy the game. There's a good game under the mess, somewhere. But they should have just bit the bullet and delayed it another month or two instead of releasing what they did for the holidays.
  The reason they sold so many copies though, is because pre-ordering. People bought them before they ever saw the game in action. And games like Stalker 2 are the reason why you shouldn't pre-order. Because the chances of getting burned by busted-ass shit like this is increasingly more common. Again, because people pre-order the fuck out of games.

Well, my thoughts on this are pretty 'basic.' I buy games that I enjoy. I think that <5% of my games purchased in the last two years are games that have been released within a year of when I buy them.
There are more than enough games that are amazing from the past 30 years to keep me occupied for the next 10, and not a single one of them stresses my 12 year old computer. Plus, while I can understand the complaints about Steam being the massive titan that it is, I am quite happy with them and their Linux gaming enabling work. I really do just install games and play them.

Any of you feel like we've become so fixated on graphics and perfomance to the point where the actual game part of a video game is often overlooked, or at least underemphasized?
I feel like everyone else has.

I definitely don't see a fixation of performance lol
The reliance on AI upscaling and frame generation, while the entire game takes up half or your entire SSD shows that optimization is an after thought. These solutions make everything look pretty and smooth, at the cost of how it actually feels to play (input lag up the fucking ass that makes the game feel way worse). Couple that with the myriad of performance issues the majority of AAA games have at launch.
The focus is entirely on making something visually good looking that will sell millions in pre-orders alone.

Well, game journalists need to sell gaming hardware and AAA games. Those guys have the ad money.
Just play what you like.

I don't know what you're talking about, old games were just as fucking janky on release, and most of them took years of modders fixing all those issues for them to get better.
Fallout 1 & 2 - janky on release
Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 - janky on release
Morrowind - janky on release
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Chernobyl - janky on release
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 - janky on release
All of these were capable of being installed and "just playing" them on release. There were countless bugs and janky behavior and that's normal and we're now spoiled by day 1 patches. STALKER 2 has been out a month and has had three major patches for bug fixes. STALKER Call of Chernobyl probably could have used the same but in 2007 the infrastructure to push quick updates just wasn't there yet. Steam had only released by Valve in late 2003, roughly three and a half years earlier.

I think realistic graphics in 3D games got to be good enough that further improvement doesn't really matter any more in 2011 (Skyrim) but I can see an argument for putting it as late as to 2016 (Witcher 3).
- I feel like I might get a ton of downvotes for this, but I kind of disagree. Maybe when it comes to things like texture detail, we certainly don’t need every single hair on Roach modeled with full physics or anything.
  That’s only a subset of what constitutes graphics in a game though. I think that while it is computationally expensive, the improvements in lighting that we’re seeing contribute to making graphics more realistic and do matter.
  I get that people meme on Ray Tracing and the whole RTX On thing, but lighting techniques like Path Tracing, Global Illumination, and Dynamic Illumination are just as much a generational shift as physics was in HL2. Output resolution and texture resolution got pushed to a point where any further gains are marginal improvements at best. Physics is getting to that point, although there’s still room for improvement. Look at how well the finals handles destruction physics, or the ballistics models used in Arma 3. Lighting is the next thing being refined, and it has a ways to go. I’d bet that in 10 years full, real time, dynamic, ray traced lighting will be taken for granted, and we’ll be arguing whether there’s any value or added realism benefit to increasing the number of individual rays cast by each light source, or how many bounces they take. I’d also not be surprised if people were memeing about RTX Sound On at that point and saying that game audio peaked with HRTF or Spatial Audio.

The best games these days are almost all indie games, stuff about AAA & ray tracing etc etc is more of a nerd hobby fueled by the industry rather than entertainment.
Also there are many retro games that used to be AA & they are just as good today as they were 20 years ago. If you want good gameplay there are so many amazing games to play a lifetime is not enough to even scratch the surface.

I see all the graphics technologies as an extra bonus to the gaming experience. It might make the game experience slightly better; but it alone doesn't make the best experience.
I've tried various team based shooters over time like Dirty Bomb, Overwatch, Paladins, and even now I try newer stuff, like Marvel Rivals. However everytime I feel get bored of them, I hop onto TF2 and no other team based shooter gives the the same satisfying gameplay loop compared to it.
Regardless of graphics; a well made skill based game can keep players for a long time inside it; i mean just look at aoe2, it's the chess of strategy games and a ton of people still play it to this day.

What is starting to annoy me is context button prompts. One button to rule them all i mean. What is this, an elaborate power point presentation? Feels like a relic of the mouse in action.
- That's been around forever lol
  Super Mario Bros has context buttons. The run button is also shoot fire if you use it in the right context.

Yeah, I'm sick of it as well. Having to guess whether my rig will play something at a framerate that won't make me sick because a dev studio chose pretty graphics (that aren't really much better than AAA 10 years ago) over good optimization.
Most of the games I play are relatively undemanding for this reason. That and because indie games don't have as much monetization.

2023 was a phenomenal year for gaming. One great game after another. AAA and indy. Of course there will always also be bad games. But I think we do have enough good stuff. And looking at Ubisoft it seems like customer's dissatisfaction with bad spectacles seems to reach the big companies. And with development tools becoming ever more accessible I think we're looking at a bright future.

There are many games where you just install and play them. I've found many after excluding both AAAs and popular indies.
As far as AAA goes, the very emphasis is on graphics, sound, etc (big ehhh to the gameplay). Popular indies are also not my thing because it has become more of a social activity and the makers themselves play on that a bit. Aside from those two categories itself, I've got maybe a hundred good games which can be played maybe hundred to a few hundreds of hours each, maybe more. Most of them unplayed.
Old games are also something which are not going away if you check compatibility in advance (or use GOG preservation mark games, which apparently try to fix those problems).
I'm currently playing Battlefront 2004 and Monster Slayers (deckbuilder) but have a shitload of games from many genres installed. Most of them unheard of, being good quality in game design and enjoyable for many hours.