For anyone that does mostly mobile gaming: I’m curious if you feel it’s enriched your life or has just been there to pass time?
It doesn't matter the complexity or hardcore-ness of a game, its comparing a social experience to an anti-social experience. Social elements of mobile games, to my understanding, are mostly asynchronous like sharing a score or turn-based games. The asynchronous part eliminates the enriching factors of making it memorable.
Personally, I think the best games on iOS are better than the best games of the 90s. Reasonable people may disagree, however, it's definitely not far.
> For anyone that does mostly mobile gaming: I’m curious if you feel it’s enriched your life or has just been there to pass time?
Yes.
I think the best iOS games are on average much more polished, but less deep/engaging than what we had in the 90s. Some of this is due to the nature of the platform - iOS games are often designed to be played in short sessions instead of sucking you in for hours like a SNES era JRPG.
The elephant in the room though is micro-transactions. Early console games were a complete experience that you bought (or convinced your parents to buy) once. A lot of top grossing iOS games are constantly trying to get more money out of their audience. This skews the design of these games in all kinds of ways like unnecessary timers, pay2win multiplayer, unfair difficulty curves that require "boosts", or repetitive, daily chores to keep people coming back. I think it's these elements that make me long for 90s era video games.