No offence to the author, but this feels like a pretty poorly planned study at virtually every data point. To start, there's little in the first place to suggest anything resembling a causal relationship between "open-world design" (which runs a pretty wide gamut of potential definitions, formal or otherwise, and is questionably encompassed by the similarly named genre tag on IGDB) and Metacritic scores. The hypothesis itself has a bunch of untested assumptions in it, none of which are relevant to "open-world design", which the rest of the study either completely glosses over or fails to account for. Et cetera...<p>I personally don't believe games are getting worse. From my perspective, as someone who makes them and plays a lot of them, sometimes for the sake of making them, sometimes for the sake of playing them, sometimes both, games are not really that much better or worse than they have been historically, in terms of what they are able to offer individually as pieces of entertainment and artistic craftsmanship.<p>But I do think tastes have changed tremendously, and more than that, the ways in which people talk about playing games, and how they actually go about talking about playing games (from a mechanical/technological perspective), have changed even more tremendously. There's a lot more public scrutiny now, and a lot of that scrutiny, because of the way social media platforms, where people talk about stuff, tend to work, that scrutiny is simultaneously much more intense and broader in effect, which makes things FEEL a lot worse than they are.<p>I think there's also a lot of nostalgia from people who grew up in one media generation and now, as more risk-averse, time- and attention-starved adults, they bemoan the fact that things have not only changed from that, but that they're different and cater to a different audience, which is not them, with different tastes, which are not theirs.