Do computer scientists care about the complexity of specific games still? One subfield of computer science that used to be quite popular is the computational complexity of playing particular games. At the end of the 1900s there was a slew of research on this, examine games ranging from the universally known such as Go and Chess to the more obscure such as Sim and Domineering. A look at the Wikipedia page shows that many papers along these lines were published not only in specialty venues, but top CS Theory venues as a whole such as SIAM Journal of Computing, J. Combin. Theory Ser. A, and STOC.

Over the past years, there have been a number of papers along these lines, primarily targeting computer games such as Bejeweled, many classical Nintendo games, and Pokémon. These later publications tend to be not published in peer-reviewed venues, or published in venues far less mainstream than the previous wave. Looking at some algorithmic game theory proceedings and journals, I’ve noticed few have papers on particular games. Instead, they tend to focus on AI playing games or more wholistic theoretical concerns not restricted to particular games.

My questions are:


Is this assessment of history correct?
Assuming the answer to #1 is yes, has something changed in the culture or interests of computer scientists that has lead to this?
Are results along these lines no longer considered publishable?


Some context: I’m a young computer science researcher who hasn’t ever paid much attention to this field, but who has recently started dabbling in examining the complexity of games with my gaming buddies. I decided to do a preliminary literature review and was surprised by this pattern I’ve noticed.
(Expanding my comment.)

I think your assessment is correct -- it's much harder to publish results of the form "game X is NP-hard" today than it was last century -- although it is not something I've looked into.

I think the reason for this is the following. 

The first few examples of NP-hard games are interesting. It means we can say "many games turn out to be NP-hard". That helps motivate research on NP-hardness and helps scientific communication with the general public.

However, once, say, half a dozen examples have been established, what is the value of adding more examples? Of course, there is value in having more examples, but it becomes more marginal. Each successive example is less surprising and doesn't really change the above statement.

Moreover, many of these proofs are quite messy -- not the sort of thing a reviewer is keen to work through.

Note that this phenomenon is not exclusive to results about games. I think there are many papers that struggle to get published today even though they'd sail in 30 years ago. For example, Karp's 21 NP-complete problems is a celebrated paper, but a similar list of NP-complete problems would struggle to get published today. The reason is simply that those 21 examples were surprising then, but are not today.

An important side note: In essentially all examples, the original game is not NP-hard because it has a finite, albeit extremely large, state space. Thus the NP-hardness is proved about some generalization of the game. Such as Chess on n-by-n boards with slightly modified rules.