During my early childhood in the late 90's, computers was still a fairly new phenomenon. If you had a computer back then, it was either an ancient Macintosh or Windows 95/98, and the concept of gaming had not yet been defined. At this stage there were not many games around, Quake, Half Life, Warcraft, Starcraft, Age of Empires, Zelda, were probably the biggest titles, and man did people enjoy them! In these years, games were considered to be a nerd-activity at most, but compared to the 80's it had become a lot more popular.
When Counter-Strike came around 1999, things started to get serious, and the strife of becoming '1337' was taken to new lengths. If you didn't know what that term meant, you were ridiculed, owned, spanked, pwned and prawned – many times over... Suddenly an elitist, diabolical group of nerds had spawned, and it didn't matter how skilled you were at football, or how much you would get laid – if you weren't part of the gaming world, you were just a noob, a muggler... But things changed, and slowly, along with the fading away of ICQ, Limewire and DC++, gaming flourished like nothing else, and eventually came to involve all sorts of people.
I don't know if it was simply for the fact that everything was new and exciting, but I remember that quickly when games got popular, at least in my generation, all other entertainment seemed outdated and boring... Well, except for maybe Harry Potter and Die Hard...
However, games has always been around, only in less sophisticated forms. Something that I think differentiates many computer games from old card games etc, is that they tend to be much more visual – like being placed in a war, or in a fantasy world. These themes could suddenly be expanded to the point of becoming more like simulations rather than just a setting, and many of the electronic games are basically games within worlds, where one part of the game is to grasp the environment, and another part is to actually play the game...
It's all about the novelties
A game of chess could easily be displayed by differently sized bricks or stones, but it can also be represented by horses, queens and kings, the visual factors of the game – and for many people including myself, these things are just as important as the game itself. If we look at an old board game like Monopoly, we see very little depth in terms of visual display, but yet it's just as much a game as for example Starcraft, where a whole world can be seen behind the details, colors and storyline. Virtual games seem to have changed the way we look at games, and in many cases they are more like movies than actual games.
However, while visuals can be defined by the amount of geometry and perfectly aligned textures, it can also be described in terms of the fantasy and creativity behind it all, something which is hard to put your finger on. If you look at Starcraft 1 in comparison to Starcraft 2, there is a lot less details in the first game, but yet it still has a lot of depth to it(even more in my opinion).
I believe Heroes of Might and Magic can illustrate this as well, where your armies are represented by a character and a number. The characters can be observed in detail, while the amount of them is displayed by plain, boring numbers. If the number instead would be replaced by thousands of 3D-models, it would probably clutter many other parts of the game, not necessarily making the game any better. It's the way it comes together that matters.
Less things can make things more visual..
Growing up in the unfoldment of the gaming era, I'm inclined to say "it was better in the old days". I've seen most games up until now, and although there has been a lot of progress in terms of graphics, I'm still marginally impressed by the development.
Personally I don't feel much interest in the competitive aspects of the games, I rather enjoy the combination of gameplay, story and artwork. And as much as I hate to say it, I have to look both high and low to find anything exciting these days... Maybe I'm being meticulous, but my verdict is that.
Since technology advances quickly, and as new gadgets come along, like VR-headsets etc, the biggest challange seems to be to preserve the quality of depth and story.
Text corrected with the help of https://www.jspell.com/public-spell-checker.html