I was thinking about this again, though in an historical sense, and wondered how big a part the aristocratic sponsoring system (the "patronage" system) played in this...As I recall, one thing that could spark a Golden Age would be a new prince who was heavily invested in the arts and sciences. That could lead to a might flourishing, particularly if there were also competition and feelings of great city pride and so on. If you had, say, three different princes in three different cities all interested in outdoing each other in terms of architecture, art, or what have you, there could be a great golden age. Of course, the costs of all this would ultimately be extracted from the peasants, probably under protest and by force.

Obviously, we can't have anything like that now, except perhaps in some dictatorship. I doubt very seriously you could ever levy a serious tax or get enough people interested in heavily investing in art or some new type of videogame or whatever it was. After all, to really be "art" it would need to be disconnected from immediate concerns about financial gain; the artists/developers would need to be independent enough from financial considerations to be able to pursue goals that might very well lead to dead ends.

To put this in game development terms, the problem we have now is that the type of folks holding the purse strings aren't interested in any "basic research," long-term projects, or anything that seems too risky or far out. This means that if there was some Da Vinci out there of videogames, he'd be forced to work on the latest movie-licensed FPS. This is contrast to the early days (the 80s that you guys keep bringing up), in which it was entirely possible for one person to create a full-fledged, commercial quality game. Therefore, it definitely isn't silly to talk about that period being a "golden age" of sorts, since men and women of vision could certainly see their projects through.