Games absolutely age. I recently went back to try and play the original Deus Ex game that came out in 2000, and it feels super clunky compared to modern games. The original Doom is definitely a classic, but that doesn't mean it can't feel dated. For example, it's pretty common in Doom for walls to open up behind you, surrounding you with demons, even though there was no indication that the wall would open. Designers have learned that killing the player with no warning is usually more frustrating than fun, so they try not to do it any more.
Yeah, but you are still getting killed out of nowhere. The audio cue was also usually accompanied by the sound of all the fireballs and shotgun blasts flying your way. That's why devs do stuff now like put blood on the floor if there's some sort of trap, so an observant player can dodge it, or at least learn how to avoid pointless deaths. Unless you know it's there ahead of time, there's no way in Doom to know that picking up a certain item or pressing a certain button will cause demons to start pouring out of the walls around you.
Games aren't necessarily improved by smoothing out the frustrations. Part of the point is to be challenged, and to have sections which are difficult, and produce anxiety. The joy comes from finding out how to overcome those sections.
Additionally, because everyone will have different trouble spots, a game which has smoothed out the frustrations for the greatest number of people is really a game which doesn't provide much challenge. The worst culprits here would be the games of the mid-2000s, with their heavy cinematics, and extremely low difficulty. Conversely, these games fare worse over time than something like classic Doom: the gameplay was never there in the first place, and the graphics only wowed people 1.5 decades ago.
That's not what I'm saying. It is a classic. But the author of the article says that the "perfect" FPS is the original doom. I'm arguing that no, for someone playing it without nostalgia glasses distorting reality, the game is rather uninteresting for anyone who hasn't played it as a kid.
I'll grant you that "perfect" is not a very useful term in this case. Perfect means many different things to different people.
But, I'd absolutely disagree that nostalgia is the only thing that makes classic Doom fun. And, it's the crux of what I meant when I said "games don't age." There is a style of gameplay there which I believe is fun at any period in time. There's a lot I could say here, but I'd argue that if a game is only interesting when it's novel and it's cutting edge, then the core gameplay was never good to begin with. (for example, Chess is pretty archaic, but the idea that Chess was only fun back when it was really first popularized is similarly false.)
