Also, this is pretty ignorant of the fact that one of the most significant theological and philosophical movements of recent western history was the Reformation, which was specifically staked on the claim that "reasoning-your-way-to-God" was a fundamental right and responsibility of all believers, not just a limited caste of priests. This had implications far beyond theology, and is arguably the foundation of most western ideas of self-determination to begin with.

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.

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.

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.