Both Bill and Matt are making some good points here. I do think it's not as clear cut or as simple as we may like it to be though.

First of all, it's far too early to judge, although certain patterns can be observed already. If the definition of a Golden Era is the equivalent of a Cambrian Explosion (a burst of growth in different, previously unexplored, directions, a period of time densely populated with a large number of successive innovations and discoveries, etc) then I would argue that the early 80s were definitely one such period (1978 - 1986) - especially in the 8bit computer gaming world. But so was the following 16 bit era (arcades, amiga, PC, consoles) that saw a second wave of new technologies, game design innovations and an immense amount of (mostly forgotten) experiments that continue to influence game design to this day. Similarly, I would also argue that the original Playstation, the period between 1995 and 1999, was an extremely exciting period for game designers, with yet another large group of new experiments and game design patterns emerging.

Although technological progress is currently outpacing our capacity to keep up with it, in terms of game design, the latter has still made sufficient progress in the past 10 years. It is possible that we're about to enter a decade (2010-2020) of unprecedented growth and innovation for a number of different reasons.

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"You must not give the world what it asks for, but what it needs."

-- Dijkstra