I agree with you in general, but I think it has to be said that we also live in the era of things like the source for Unreal Engine 5 being completely and wholly available, along with a zillion tutorials and extremely well documented source. This is unlike anything we had, and better in basically every single way imaginable. In the hardware world there's Pi's, dirt cheap PCBs that you can have delivered in < 24 hours, and so on endlessly. It's like instead of breaking into a trailer, we've all been granted carte blanche access to a mansion.
But maybe there was something about how counter-culture and esoteric stuff was itself attractive precisely because of that. There was also a lot more reward for a lot less work, largely because so few people were doing it. Now if somebody wants to go learn Unreal then it's just a pretty mundane and common thing, and you'll also be largely incompetent unless you're willing to dedicate years to it. By contrast when I was a kid changing the text in a shareware installer was enough to wow my friends with my leet skills, and that's something that took about 5 minutes to do, and not that much longer to learn. Oh and then creating secret directories by naming them alt+255, and so on. Dumb stuff, but it soon enough led me to much more than parlor tricks.
> But maybe there was something about how counter-culture and esoteric stuff was itself attractive precisely because of that.
There's definitely that element, but I also think something missed by compartmentalizing hardware "tinkering" to devices designed specifically for the task. Nothing about a Raspberry Pi, for instance, is mysterious. If a person is going to buy one, they already have a significant level of interest and base knowledge. A kid's not gonna have one lying around and get curious about it unless their parent is a geek who owns those things, and even then said kid may have no good reason to even bother with one. Practically nobody today is opening up their laptop or their phone to mod it or even just see what's inside. I'm not saying the modern situation is bad, but a significant amount of it is artificial in a way that wasn't when the devices one would play with were the devices actually being used, and it's not clear to me whether what we have now is actually better in regard to inspiring future generations. Engaging with one's everyday hardware is an exercise in the power process that fewer and fewer generations are experiencing.
The big difference is that people used to mod existing games. That allowed modders to leverage the game's engine, gameplay design, art, and even its existing playerbase.
Having a full-featured open-source game engine is great, but starting with that means starting at square one.
By obsessively enforcing copyright and "anti-cheat", we effectively bury the game-making process 6 feet underground. Every game is declared dead at the very moment of its release. Every decision its creators made up to then is set in stone. The game studio itself must exist in isolation, ignorant of the very world it is creating its games for.
It's no wonder that AAA studios are so out of touch with the people who play their games. Gamers are explicitly excluded from the creative process.
That's their loss. Meanwhile Minecraft is the most sold game ever, and Roblox is probably not far behind. (That one comes with its own issues, but hopefully children are sick of those by the time they become teens and are ready to move on to something more open ?)
One consideration is maybe stuff that's "hackable", i.e. immediately accessible, can be incrementally and reversibly modified, is more accessible to "play" while stuff that's extremely capable but has a high activation cost (setting up the environment, learning all the stuff to make something basic etc.) is more accessible only to "focused / goal oriented study" and this has all kinds of implications on who does it, who succeeds, under which circumstances etc.
e.g. my friend tells me you can open game.exe in notepad + change this value to walk on lava, then I fiddle with it and tl;dr make a map of my school, then get frustrated with limitations and start learning a game engine with some practical background on what these concepts are etc.
vs. I decide want to make a game because that's cool, I buy a book on game programming, it depends on these libraries, I install them, I install a compiler, the libraries don't work with the compiler/each other, ......... and give up because the grit in my life is reserved for stuff other than video games.
... like really, what is the overlap of people that are really mind blowingly creative as artists, and the people that are super type A driven to go through all this frustration up front? less friction, more better art
But maybe there was something about how counter-culture and esoteric stuff was itself attractive precisely because of that. There was also a lot more reward for a lot less work, largely because so few people were doing it. Now if somebody wants to go learn Unreal then it's just a pretty mundane and common thing, and you'll also be largely incompetent unless you're willing to dedicate years to it. By contrast when I was a kid changing the text in a shareware installer was enough to wow my friends with my leet skills, and that's something that took about 5 minutes to do, and not that much longer to learn. Oh and then creating secret directories by naming them alt+255, and so on. Dumb stuff, but it soon enough led me to much more than parlor tricks.