Worst trends in video games?

[Matt_H]

Achievements. It seems to me that these "extra-curricular" developer-/publisher-imposed performance benchmarks are stifling freeform exploration of games.

[Matt_H]

As for me, I'll vote for the ur-trend: everybody blindly copying what everybody else is doing without any regard to whether it fits in their game or was even good to begin with. That's how all the rest of these trends proliferate.

Excellent point - I've noticed this pattern across the software field. With web browsers, one of them (Chrome?) comes up with tabs in the title bar, and now they all have it. Same thing with Linux-y window managers.