system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why did point-to-aim videogame light guns die 
out in the transition from CRT televisions?

I'm vaguely familiar with the nature of how light guns used to work, a patterned flash-frame that the gun used to calculate where it was pointing. I'm also vaguely familiar with what light guns have to do nowadays in order to mimic that former behaviour with Wii-esque reference lights and an IR sensor.

What I don't understand is, what is inherently different about television technology now that the system that used to exist is no longer possible. Is it a matter of resolution, that the pattern would now be ineffective? Is it that CRT used to be the standard, but now it could be a variety of technologies and having no keystone standard makes coming up with a new trick impossible?

Is there any hope to getting back to point-to-aim light guns, or are we sticking with drag-to-aim cursor guns from here on out?
gpt
CRTs work by having an electron beam light up the phosphor of the screen.  The electron beam can only light up one pixel at a time.  That lit up dot scans across the screen one scanline at a time all the way down the screen to form an image.  It happens so fast that you don't see it happening.  The light gun has a very narrow view of the screen, and by measuring when it sees the brightness spike within the 60th of a second that it takes to refresh the screen, it can tell where on the screen it is pointing.

LCDs don't flicker like that.  Every pixel is always on, so it wouldn't work to look for a brightness spike to calculate where the gun is pointing.  The Wii uses a very different technique.