[DrewADesign]

Hm... don't think I agree with a lot the author says, here.

Cartoons are compelling because they're a colorful, heavily abstracted and anthropomorphized, impossibly expressive worlds without the hard and fast limitations of our physical existence. If Excitebike and lazy Hanna-Barbera cartoons are your only animated escapes from the real world, classic style Disney cartoons offer arrestingly compelling visuals and stories.

But 7 year olds probably can't remember a time without Splatoon 2 and Super Mario Odyssey and Zelda Breath of The Wild and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. They've not only been watching, but have been interacting with and manipulating environments with that level of flashiness and abstraction for their entire conscious existence. While they obviously will still enjoy cartoons because they're beautiful and entertaining, they just won't impact them like they did us.

I also think this author erroneously asserts that Disney's remakes solely prey upon nostalgia. Children, not middle-aged fans of the originals, are still the primary audience for Disney movies, so that's not likely. They also assume that our generation's media hit the magic Goldilocks balance while the ones that came before us were contemptibly outdated and the ones that came after us were either superficial, or mocking useful social mores, or guilty of some other moral transgression. You might recognize this behavior from, you know, every other generation.

Kids growing up now will have a level of media sophistication few non-experts in prior generations could ever hope to match.

[foxes]

Based comment.

Same mindset applies to lots of things on HN: C vs Rust, Php vs typescript, email vs chat app.

Majority of HNers seem like they are seething that change happens and what they learnt before is the only correct choice. Best way is to appreciate and learn from the past but be still be open to new things. Being stuck ages you into obsolescence.

[Gigachad]

HN is the embodiment of the "old man yells at cloud" meme. The world moves on and they are angry that the next generation doesn't care about writing perl scripts for their custom gentoo install.

>Old movies are good because back in my day they just made them better. Now all they make is mass produced crap!

[didericis]

Being stuck due to arrogance is bad. Changing arbitrarily is also bad. Being open to new things does not mean all new things are automatically good. Being like old things does also make things automatically good. What is "good" is very very tricky to define, and context dependent.

[DrewADesign]

What is inherently bad about arbitrary change? Sure it's bad in user interfaces and stable systems, but in the grand scheme of things those are edge cases. Why does it matter if some æsthetic preference changes arbitrarily?

[didericis]

The fact that you consider stable systems edge cases speaks to the issue.

Wealth is built up over generations via systems that are extensible and reusable by those that come after. If we changed the standard size of screws because we thought it looked better aesthetically, we'd instantly make massive swaths of previous work unusable.

Exploratory change is needed to figure out where improvements can be found, and I generally enjoy building and working with novel technology much more than trying to interface with older systems, but there should be some sort of purpose for the change. Older systems also need a certain amount of pruning and destruction to remove accumulated cruft, so it's not like it's always best to use what's been accumulated.

The correct balance is hard. Achieving that balance requires intentional effort, not arbitrary change or arbitrary preservation, if only in some sort of testing/evaluation phase (sometimes it does make sense to just arbitrarily tweak stuff and see if it ends up working better, but you need to actually do some sort of intentional verification to see if it's worth keeping).

[DrewADesign]

Change controlled systems are an edge case in the world at large. I agree that arbitrary change is bad in systems but that's not what you said.

[didericis]

Counter argument: I disagree with most of what you say here.

I think what impacts all people, regardless of age, is much less about the medium and much more about message. I disagree with the "medium is the message" idea being applied universally. Zelda Breath of the Wild has the same spirit as the Gameboy games, and the NES games. And before that, the same spirit of the games and fantasy books about knights, and forts with secret passageways made out of sticks and renaissance fairs. Super Mario Odyssey is a digital evolutions of the same kind of playgrounds and energy like jungle gyms, or tag, and running around and collecting things like hide and go seek or a scavenger hunt. Splatoon is like a soccer game, or an airsoft game, or any kind of childhood battle/skirmish game. Each of those types of games I think map to styles of play that are really, really old.

I do think there is a message in the medium, though, and that the message is "we think this game/story is important enough to convey properly that we'll invest cutting edge technology to enable the best possible experience". I think each generation actually does in fact experience the same impact when that message is received. They way it is conveyed changes, because the cutting edge changes.

You can tell when media hits that Goldilocks zone; it's not something frozen in any particular time. It moves and evolves. The Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings holds up. The original Star Wars holds up. The first James Bond holds up. The Wizard of Oz holds up. Metropolis holds up. Shakespeare holds up. Etc etc. You can trace stories back eons, and the ones that convey core messages about human experience in a time/era appropriate way are an essential part of how we think of ourselves. People who feel rooted and secure in their cultural context don't find the past contemptible, they are reassured and feel connected to an evolving set of stories.

You can still see that with modern media. It will vary person to person, each cultural niche and personality type has a different Goldilocks zone preference.

I don't think variety and saturation with more different forms of expression than we could dream of is actual sophistication. In a lot of ways it's actually more difficult than I think it's ever been to really convey a compelling story in a cutting edge manner. The army of people and resources needed to make a modern movie is insane, as it is for a cutting edge video game. I think that's leading to less sophistication, because the inevitable bureaucratic behemoths that are needed to create cutting edge story telling tends to kill off a lot of the best storytellers. The best story tellers should be more discoverable than ever, but it's increasingly difficult to plug them into these incredibly expensive projects.

[DrewADesign]

> I think what impacts all people, regardless of age, is much less about the medium and much more about message.

The general subject is remakes of old Disney movies. It's the same story in a new movie, making the message the independent variable.

Beyond that, we'd see vastly more radio programming aimed at kids if that was true. It's several orders of magnitude cheaper to create and distribute. What most people who don't work professionally in the A&E and Visual Arts fields don't realize is how much those visuals affect them. That's why they're so effective. The communicate deeply and viscerally in ways that aren't immediately obvious, but are incredibly powerful. That's why advertisers spend as much money as they do creating commercials with virtually no obvious story arc. We've already got most of the story in our heads and they're just pushing the buttons to activate it in ways that are useful to them.

> I do think there is a message in the medium, though, and that the message is "we think this game/story is important enough to convey properly that we'll invest cutting edge technology to enable the best possible experience". I think each generation actually does in fact experience the same impact when that message is received. They way it is conveyed changes, because the cutting edge changes.

The vast majority of adults don't take that much context into account when consuming media, even if they think they do... let alone children. Grandiosity is obviously a part of the message, but you just can't constrict the effects of visual communication to neatly defined categories like that.

Have you ever been listening to a song or watching video media or playing a game with someone nd they say "oh, this is my favorite part!" ... and you just don't get it? It triggers something in their brain that just doesn't connect with you. The difference between your perception of that media and theirs is the context in which it was processed-- your brain chemistry and all of your lived experiences and mood and pharmaceutical influences and thoughts and dreams and insecurities combined receive that stimuli and generate emotional responses.

> You can tell when media hits that Goldilocks zone > each cultural niche and personality type has a different Goldilocks zone preference.

You're putting things into buckets that aren't representative of the real world. Everybody can tell when media hits the Goldilocks zone because their own tastes define it. It goes far, far beyond personality types and cultural niches. Baby bear and Papa bear were likely perfectly happy with their porridge and Goldilocks liking Mama Bear's porridge didn't mean shit other than mama bear and goldilocks had narrow but overlapping heat tolerances.