Being old as dirt, a friend of mine who is equally paleolithic kind of came to the conclusion that what I actually miss is the feel of the old, very dangerous Dungeons & Dragons games of the past. In those days we would make characters and if they somehow lived to a new level you would bother looking into what kind of meager bonuses you received, or some new spells. Magic Items were always nice and a good way to help you survive. Death was common, and when characters advanced past 5th level it was a big deal. I loved my characters, but I also was ok when they died because it was a sacrifice on the altar of danger.
The next generation of Pen and Paper Role-Playing games came out looking to change that and had a more Narrative bent than D&D, which was hatched from a wargame and still had those genes. More emphasis was made on characters living and progressing because to a Narrativist point of view, character death is the end of the story.
Computer Games and Console games eventually became popular, and I originally thought there was a good chance that P&P would be replaced by the video counterpart, but this was not to happen. In addition to the fact that the world and interface could not sustain the same freedom, the video game was able to feed someone a much bigger ego trip. The computer GM does not complain about murder hobo behavior, and it is there to feed you success. Video Games are made to turn a profit as I said in the OP, so the game does not have the same kind of repercussions. Players of computer/console games found perma-death less and less common. The attention spans reduced, the draw of saving the world every time with the same character you started with grew and was reinforced over many titles.
How does this relate to this thread?
Well I believe that in my original gaming experiences we didn't have as much of the PCs fighting each other because the world was always trying to kill us and we needed each other to survive. Losing even one member usually hurt the party, and the Role-Playing wasn't so Telenovela back then in my groups so no one really spent time having these big conflicts over characters talking to each other like middle school enemies (even though ironically back then we actually were in middle school
). We had bigger fish to fry. My friend has a list of rules he goes by and one of his rules is that the PCs need to be cohesive. I feel that this is wise rule. My objection to something like that rule would usually be in the form of suggesting that variety is good, but I think that it's really not. At least not if you are to have the classic Star Wars hero's journey or some variation of that which bears resemblance to the movie feel. No, give me a group ready to actually kill some bad guys instead of being antisocial individual edge lords any day of the week.