I have two ideas for why the GUIs got boring that don't have anything to do with enshittification. I have no idea if either is accurate or not.
The first suggested reason I have is that maybe game console menus got dull because they don't have so much reason to be exciting any more. The UI for an old console like a Gamecube or a PS2 wanted to show you a beautiful abstract sculpture made out of floating glass rectangles or prisms in order to wow you a little bit the first time you switch it on: reviewers (and customers) were going to be comparing it head to head with last gen hardware and vendors would like them to immediately think "oh my this new console so powerful, much more so than the PS1 was, look how pretty the things it can draw are" from the get-go before they've even put a game in. On a modern console the games have already passed some big high water marks for visual fidelity (since with shaders you can draw pretty much anything you like with enough effort) and customers are used to that, so something like a pretty sculpture made out of light and magic isn't going to impress people very much.
(I believe the kind of thing that a PS5 can draw much more impressively than a PS4 is something like a big high-detail crowd scene, which involves loading quite a lot of data to draw, and I don't think it's a good idea to have a GUI which takes noticeable time to load just so it can display a high detail scene in the background or a high detail splash screen? The old shiny prism sculpture thing used a tiny number of triangles.)
The other utilitarian suggestion I have is that with an older game console that has a optical disk or cartridge slot, a lot more of the screen real estate isn't doing much and can be dedicated to shiny GUI without harming utility. The most important affordance for a games console is the act of picking a game to play happened. With older consoles this happened outside the console's GUI by pushing an object into a slot on the console. Whereas a modern console has an SSD in it and will pick a game to play off the SSD. A GUI that is nice for picking the game you want to play is inevitably going to be boring because it wants to put emphasis on showing you a big grid of box art images for the videogames you have installed. Anything else is distracting from this purpose. There's plenty of art in the games' box art anyway so it's not like the user's eyeballs are going to get too bored.
I think the purpose of these designs are also to give you instant feedback: Your console is working, your screen is working, your speakers are working, and they're all connected together the right way.
On the GameBoy, it served a diagnostic that your cartridge was seated correctly. The Nintendo logo which jingles in would be absent or garbled if the pins of the cartridge weren't all making proper right contact.
I've been playing Dynasty Warriors: Origins on the Switch 2 recently, which is a game whose gameplay is basically nonstop big crowd scenes. It's interesting seeing the framerate jump from 30-ish mid-battle to 60 after I beat the level (because it's not rendering the enemies or doing their AI), then back down to 30 for the cutscene (because they're doing higher-quality animations and textures and models).
Booting up the PS2 and seeing some cool 3D graphics representing my saved games is pretty awesome, but after hundreds of iterations of this I eventually started wishing it'd just boot straight into the game instead.
My favourite way to enjoy the GCN boot animation was holding A just long enough that the cube would be maximally squeezed but wouldn't load into the menu.
I saw the title and was thinking "game consoles have interfaces? I thought they just had a blinking light and maybe eventually a company title screen". It's like how people talk about video game guis and im just thinking "dost thou love me? but thou must". I'm too old for this lol.
But I think a lot of this too is that these consoles nowadays are pretty much just general purpose gadgets. I have a Sony blu-ray player from around 2010ish that has the same style ui (though not as fancy, same basic look) as the PS3... and it also, in theory, supports some internet streaming instead of just playing discs. So you have this desire to share something across multiple uses, both the aesthetic across a dvd player and a video game box, but also that these gadgets do multiple jobs and it ends up converging on a lowest common denominator, similar to how like Windows 8 tried to merge with tablets and got mehy.
There was a video from f4mi talking about this regarding in-game menus. It's very interesting but a bit chaotic. There are many reasons behind it. One is that now the displays are more heterogeneous and need to be more accessible which limits the amount of things you can do. And workers don't want to take risks, because the job market is bad so in the end they just build things that don't let other people blame their work. Another one is that PlayStation 1 games set an underground aesthetic that was replaced by more mainstream menus as soon as that aesthetic lost popularity and videogames became more mainstream.
Constructed like a game: slowly introducing mechanics in isolation, then building upon them, then having them interact with other mechanics. There’s no explicit hand-holding, but instead the user’s intuition is trusted, and they’re prompted to explore and discover by leading them along through gradual introduction with care.
Oh how I wish more video games were like this. It's difficult for me to pick up new games that shackle me to an hour-long tutorial and overwhelm me with information I'll forget anyway before I get to play properly.
The thing with "character" in user interfaces is that it can very much be a bad thing. Inventing your own one-off UI conventions as a form of expression might delight you and some of your users, but frustrate others who now have to learn yet another thing.
And just learning how to interact with a game console and use its controls is already a signifiant enough task that it's been repeatedly gamified (see the Astro Bot series for one example of a game that's also in many ways a tutorial for the system).
So having the console's own UI be a bit more "standard" is not necessarily bad, and having a one-off special interface full of "character" is not necessarily good.
0x2ba22e11 | 5 hours ago
I have two ideas for why the GUIs got boring that don't have anything to do with enshittification. I have no idea if either is accurate or not.
The first suggested reason I have is that maybe game console menus got dull because they don't have so much reason to be exciting any more. The UI for an old console like a Gamecube or a PS2 wanted to show you a beautiful abstract sculpture made out of floating glass rectangles or prisms in order to wow you a little bit the first time you switch it on: reviewers (and customers) were going to be comparing it head to head with last gen hardware and vendors would like them to immediately think "oh my this new console so powerful, much more so than the PS1 was, look how pretty the things it can draw are" from the get-go before they've even put a game in. On a modern console the games have already passed some big high water marks for visual fidelity (since with shaders you can draw pretty much anything you like with enough effort) and customers are used to that, so something like a pretty sculpture made out of light and magic isn't going to impress people very much.
(I believe the kind of thing that a PS5 can draw much more impressively than a PS4 is something like a big high-detail crowd scene, which involves loading quite a lot of data to draw, and I don't think it's a good idea to have a GUI which takes noticeable time to load just so it can display a high detail scene in the background or a high detail splash screen? The old shiny prism sculpture thing used a tiny number of triangles.)
The other utilitarian suggestion I have is that with an older game console that has a optical disk or cartridge slot, a lot more of the screen real estate isn't doing much and can be dedicated to shiny GUI without harming utility. The most important affordance for a games console is the act of picking a game to play happened. With older consoles this happened outside the console's GUI by pushing an object into a slot on the console. Whereas a modern console has an SSD in it and will pick a game to play off the SSD. A GUI that is nice for picking the game you want to play is inevitably going to be boring because it wants to put emphasis on showing you a big grid of box art images for the videogames you have installed. Anything else is distracting from this purpose. There's plenty of art in the games' box art anyway so it's not like the user's eyeballs are going to get too bored.
lynndotpy | 4 hours ago
I think the purpose of these designs are also to give you instant feedback: Your console is working, your screen is working, your speakers are working, and they're all connected together the right way.
On the GameBoy, it served a diagnostic that your cartridge was seated correctly. The Nintendo logo which jingles in would be absent or garbled if the pins of the cartridge weren't all making proper right contact.
quasi_qua_quasi | 3 hours ago
I've been playing Dynasty Warriors: Origins on the Switch 2 recently, which is a game whose gameplay is basically nonstop big crowd scenes. It's interesting seeing the framerate jump from 30-ish mid-battle to 60 after I beat the level (because it's not rendering the enemies or doing their AI), then back down to 30 for the cutscene (because they're doing higher-quality animations and textures and models).
matheusmoreira | 5 hours ago
Booting up the PS2 and seeing some cool 3D graphics representing my saved games is pretty awesome, but after hundreds of iterations of this I eventually started wishing it'd just boot straight into the game instead.
quad | 5 hours ago
My favourite way to enjoy the GCN boot animation was holding A just long enough that the cube would be maximally squeezed but wouldn't load into the menu.
Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjEsXf3SJ6o
adam_d_ruppe | 3 hours ago
I saw the title and was thinking "game consoles have interfaces? I thought they just had a blinking light and maybe eventually a company title screen". It's like how people talk about video game guis and im just thinking "dost thou love me? but thou must". I'm too old for this lol.
But I think a lot of this too is that these consoles nowadays are pretty much just general purpose gadgets. I have a Sony blu-ray player from around 2010ish that has the same style ui (though not as fancy, same basic look) as the PS3... and it also, in theory, supports some internet streaming instead of just playing discs. So you have this desire to share something across multiple uses, both the aesthetic across a dvd player and a video game box, but also that these gadgets do multiple jobs and it ends up converging on a lowest common denominator, similar to how like Windows 8 tried to merge with tablets and got mehy.
aarroyoc | 6 hours ago
There was a video from f4mi talking about this regarding in-game menus. It's very interesting but a bit chaotic. There are many reasons behind it. One is that now the displays are more heterogeneous and need to be more accessible which limits the amount of things you can do. And workers don't want to take risks, because the job market is bad so in the end they just build things that don't let other people blame their work. Another one is that PlayStation 1 games set an underground aesthetic that was replaced by more mainstream menus as soon as that aesthetic lost popularity and videogames became more mainstream.
fleebee | 4 hours ago
Oh how I wish more video games were like this. It's difficult for me to pick up new games that shackle me to an hour-long tutorial and overwhelm me with information I'll forget anyway before I get to play properly.
ubernostrum | 45 minutes ago
The thing with "character" in user interfaces is that it can very much be a bad thing. Inventing your own one-off UI conventions as a form of expression might delight you and some of your users, but frustrate others who now have to learn yet another thing.
And just learning how to interact with a game console and use its controls is already a signifiant enough task that it's been repeatedly gamified (see the Astro Bot series for one example of a game that's also in many ways a tutorial for the system).
So having the console's own UI be a bit more "standard" is not necessarily bad, and having a one-off special interface full of "character" is not necessarily good.