Well here’s a topic I think nearly everybody’s shaken a stick at. But it’s a topic that seems evergreen, so sometimes you just have to add to the pile.

But before we move on to our showcase, let’s have Timothee Chalamee and Margot Robbie take the floor to talk about this next game! Later on, we’ll have Dolly Parton and Arnold Schwarzenegger discuss this cute open-world quadruple-A instant masterpiece with zero percent gameplay; guaranteed!

This little song and dance has been going on for over a decade, both parts of the song and dance honestly. The less subtle dig being this sad fear you see at modern games showcases, where they simply must bring up some celeb who doesn’t give a frog about games, stand there like a deer in headlights, and try and remember what their handler told them to say. Else the whole affair goes to shambles! “But Wyatt, Timothee Chalamee used to mod Xbox 360 controllers!” Whoa, that definitely means he should be on stage instead of an actor who was actually in one of the games getting an award.

If anything though, saying that gaming showcases have no positives to gain by mimicking the Oscars is a separate discussion. Believe it or not, my second dig at the industry’s trends is the meat of this entry.

I am tired of games relying on just their cut scenes to prove they’re good. It’s not 2004 anymore, I’m not that same preteen with no money watching long plays online for my only experience with a game I heard about. I’ve matured, and my pockets even sometimes have money in them! I see video games as video GAMES now, that video part sure is nice and all but I need me some game to continue being interested. And I ain’t alone here you know, the industry even secretly agrees considering how much it’s also still chasing Fortnite, a game that doesn’t come across like a movie you pretend to play. (Although the movie industry may be jealous of Fortnight given the premiere of feature films on the platform).

I’m missing my own points, I think, I’m just a little too mad this is still going on to think straight. Let’s stick to my points by just focusing on one game, a game that currently isn’t out: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

It’s amazing how much they’ve perfectly captured the feeling of an Indiana Jones movie, and I say this as someone who thinks Last Crusade suffers from feeling like watered-down Raiders, completely forgetting it’s a love letter to film serials in the process, so it takes a lot to impress me with this franchise.

And as for the gameplay; by this point dawg I’m not even sure it exists. That bit where Indy chucks a sledgehammer right at an enemy’s heart got my attention, but frog me there’s so little else. I want to be fair to Machine Games in that I’ve heard so many other people state they know it will be fun because of how great the Wolfenstein games are, and I still haven’t gotten around to those, so perhaps I’d be less worried if I was familiar with the game feel Machine Games has. However, it’s a weak argument that I shouldn’t be worried about the gameplay of Great Circle just because Wolfenstein was good. I still say I should have seen a deeper gameplay dive by this point, when all we’ve gotten so far is corporate slideshows that briefly discuss different puzzle elements.

They use the word gameplay in the title but it’s a collection of animations. I want a pure gameplay trailer, and the longer I don’t get one, the more I’m genuinely concerned that The Great Circle will be style over substance.

And yes, I do think this came from jealousy. Jealousy of the film industry. See, way back when the PlayStation 3 was still struggling, Naughty Dog did the unthinkable and created Uncharted. Ultimately not much more than a love letter to, well funny enough, Indiana Jones and the film serials that inspired it. Uncharted had pretty simple combat and overall gameplay, nothing terrible mind you, just more serviceable than anything else, but also put a big emphasis on capturing the swooping cameras and lighting of blockbuster films. It set the gaming world on fire.

Which is fine in and of itself. There’s a video inside of me that wants to discuss why Uncharted doesn’t strike me with remotely the same fervor it did everyone else, but I certainly don’t hate Uncharted for existing, nor do I blame it for what happened next.

More games started copying those camera angle choices and jumped into having bigger and better cutscenes. We also have both Uncharted 2 and Red Dead Redemption 1 to point to the moments when gaming suddenly had story writing most people considered good. There were good stories before those two, but the common opinion was that no games had real storytelling, with RDR and Uncharted 2 being the first to truly challenge that notion.

Red Dead Redemption I do hold the same fervor as everyone else did, but that doesn’t mean I love how many games these days now shoot for story over gameplay. RDR at least balanced gameplay and writing to be equally important, something its own prequel doesn’t even try (I love RDR 2 but there’s little defending many aspects of the gameplay as those are very much style over substance).

I’m sure some of you are hoping I trash The Last Of Us next, but hey, since I didn’t gell with Uncharted I never gave LOU a playthrough, so I don’t have opinions on how it treats story over gameplay. I can say I remember people loving the gameplay and especially the multiplayer of the original, and never hear anyone talk about the sequel’s gameplay unless it’s in a trailer for one of their endless remasters.

If we want to use hard evidence all of this stems from a jealousy of films, instead of just innovating the existing styles; we have no evidence harder than the fact cutscenes are now called cinematics. When and how did we let that change happen? Cinematics, pffp, yeah because when I play Conker I wish I was in a cinema. The Great Mighty Poo needs to be experienced in 4K UHD surround sound while my shoes are stuck to the floor from a cola stain older than I am. Wouldn’t be immersed without it.

The sad thing is this scenario has already started to happen. When the HBO Last Of Us came out (side note; it may have been for the already-forgotten Uncharted movie), Sony got famous YouTubers to go to A CINEMA to not just watch the first episode but ALSO USED THE SPACE TO PLAY UNCHARTED! I’m sorry, but you didn’t convince me Uncharted is a masterpiece, you accidentally claimed your game is just a movie.

Every medium has its own strengths and weaknesses, and while there is overlap, that doesn’t mean you can copy one-to-one. Hell, I’m the kind of person who for years has been saying a great game is a closer experience to the immersion and personal-attachment that a good book can give you. Visuals be damned! That doesn’t mean I want games to be just like books, not even Visual Novels, because even those should focus on the gameplay aspect that only video games provide.

It’s why LEGO games can be still charming with only minor changes to their formula every few entries. People like to rag on Pokemon when the stories are mid, but the original game has the midest story of the bunch and still remains the best seller, almost as if the selling point is how good it feels to catch the monsters.

Stories don’t make games. Graphics do not guarantee a game. There’s been some good cash by chasing movies, but rose-colored glasses tend to fade. I’m sure Uncharted, Last of Us, Horizon, new God of War, Red Dead 2, et all., will continue having lifelong fans who adore their stories. But, those exact fans also love the gameplay loops. People keep saying a games crash is coming, and frankly, it’s not. Not to the extent people seem to think anyway. But we are very likely on the cusp of a massive industry shift. And if there’s anything worth losing in this shift, it’s big-budget games sniffing the asses of blockbuster movies.

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Featured Image Credits: Microsoft, Machine Games, Sony Interactive, Naughty Dog, The Game Awards

Please bare with me on the writing style of this blog post. I try to stay stone-faced professional when I write these, unless it is pure comedy like with my Top Ten Things You Can Do In Naughty Bear post. This one is not a pure comedy, however, this one has a more blunt and personal feeling and I think speaking the way I normally would (barring curse words) is the best way to get this point across.

As of only a few minutes before I started writing this post, I went through my rather long list of YouTube subscriptions. I have had a YouTube account for many years, and with the account I have both created my own videos to help promote myself, and watched content for almost every day of my life for the past few years. There are several channels I still watch often, and some of them are channels I only recently started watching. This content ranges from Let's Plays, deep frying multiple foods, podcasts, animation, video essays, and other notable styles.

If you had asked me only a few months ago, I could have gone on much longer.

I made the mistake of not counting how many subscriptions I had before, but I have since unsubscribed from a great deal of channels I used to watch all the time. I no longer like videos such as movie reviews where the person just recaps the whole film and adds jokes or pointless pop culture references to eighties kid's films. My patience has worth thin for many half-hour videos I used to set aside time for. While I am willing to wait for a product I really like to release a new episode, I have also decided that some of them are taking far too long compared to my personal investment and interest. To put things in a retrospective for just how many videos I do not care about anymore, I also just reduced the amount of videos in my "watch later" list. The number used to be almost two-hundred, now it is only seventy-three, and a few of the videos I left in had a good deal of hesitation.

Funnily enough, the deleting of over half my "watch later" list came from me looking at it and basically saying the true yet cliched line of "I'm not going to live forever". My head was sick of the fact I was never going to actually watch most of these videos in my too short lifetime, and in doing so, I further questioned if I really cared about what I was admitting I wouldn't watch. Most of the videos that were scrapped came from channels I decided to unsubscribe from. Granted, there were some channels I am still subscribed to and still love that also created videos I deleted from my list, but in many of those cases it boiled down to the fact that I still liked other content they made but no longer liked the kind of content I chose to delete.

Online content is not the only art form I now have different opinions on.

I would like to admit that this and the previous year is the first time in a long time I started reading for pleasure again. My reading choices varied from classics, to unheard of, and to everything in-between. My time reading again not only reminded me of just how much reading is, but I discovered that for the first time in my life, I really love the murder-mystery genre. I used to hate it. I used to think it was cliched, either completely predictable or so unpredictable that it made no sense , or they were just plain boring. And yet after reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I have been going in and out of phases were all I watch or read is murder mysteries. Even bad ones catch my attention and interest.

This sudden genre-love was not my only discovery. During my time reading again; I have fallen in-and-out of love with J.K. Rowling's style (Loved Casual Vacancy, thought Cuckoo's Calling was way too long and padded,), I have gotten closer to liking super-heroes other than Spider-man, and I've outright grown a respect for literature that is far stronger than the one I used to have. That is saying something considering my career is "writer".

After graduating college last December, I took this year to relax and take in all the art and media I didn't have to time for before. I never expected to learn so many things about myself and my personal tastes. Some things are still true; I still love crime-dramas, I still love realism, I still think satire is the hardest and highest form of comedy, and I'm still completely disinterested in high fantasy.

And yet there are many things that aren't the same anymore. I went from regretting that I had a list of video games I never finished, to realizing that there are many good reasons to not finish certain games. I went from being the kind of person to argue that story-telling in video games is more important than gameplay, to realizing that there were too many examples of a good or great narrative being undermined by the fact the controls were nothing short of awful. I have realized that even though it remains my least favorite genre, there are many country songs I genuinely enjoy.

The real funny thing about this, is that I always knew this could happen for things you liked or disliked as a child or early teen. I have always encouraged people to re-watch shows they loved as a kid, to see if it held up to their expectations or not. I've heard too many people defend something with "I loved that as a kid!", meaning they could very well be defending something they don't even actually like anymore as they haven't given it a watch as an adult. I also very recently re-watched the entire CatDog series and discovered a show I thought I didn't care about was in fact very entertaining to me.

We are often told, and just as often talk about, how we become different people as we grow. We even discuss how our literal taste buds change as we get older. Children don't tend to care for vegetables and no one likes beer the first time, that sort of thing. I am very much a different person than I was only a few years ago. Still, I never, never suspected that I would so quickly grow out of something. The very stuff I appreciated everyday of my college life, I now find unfunny and uninteresting only one year after my graduation. I take no regret in my former interests, but it is shocking to look at something I spent so much time admiring, and having to admit it was basically just a phase I was going through. I also never expected to go through phases as a full grown adult man, but I guess those can be more mature than we're often led to believe.

You know, when I was a kid, I hated mint. It disgusted me as a flavor, it killed anything it touched. Now I think mint is one of the most delicious flavors I've ever tried, and I think it goes good with everything. When I was a kid, I thought Tiny Toon Adventures was a good show, and now it's one of my favorites because I know understand so many animation in-jokes that they snuck in, blatantly or otherwise. When I was a kid, I liked the Teletubbies, and I don't need to tell you the utter disdain I have for that show as an adult.

You want to know something else though? In high school, I hated Dr. Pepper. I do mean the cola, in case that is the name of an actual person or a TV show or something. For years, I've wanted to buy it and see if my taste buds are different. See if I'd like it now. I feel it's worth doing, even if it would have been less than ten years ago when I hated it. Seeing how fast I've grown out of media I loved in college, maybe I should revisit some things I used to not like five or six years ago. I remember thinking The Graduate was boring, maybe I'll understand it now. I remember thinking Jaws was a chore to sit through, maybe current me thinks it's a suspenseful experience like I always did with Alien.

What I'm saying is, I think it may be important to find your Dr. Pepper. Something you remember having a strong opinion on, but can't shake the fact it may be different now.

My title for this post is still a question, and I guess I should try to answer it. The truth is, it really just confuses me that said tastes can still shift so hard later in life. I know that I like different things than I did as a child. I know that my early teens have little impact on my tastes in adulthood. I don't understand why there are things I enjoyed as an adult, that I almost despise one year later. I understand growing as a person, I can understand having a completely different personality even after a short amount of time, there are too many life experiences to list that can that to you. I just don't see a reason why my artistic taste buds have to have a drastic change again. I don't think I'll ever again like the stuff that helped keep a smile on my face during college's hard times, and I don't get why.

Sometimes your favorite movies are removed from the list when more come along. Sometimes a growing problem with a TV show makes you give up on watching the newer seasons. And I guess, sometimes you just sit down and go "I don't like this anymore and I don't think I ever will again".

I don't know what to tell you in this case. Things change, even in the span of a year. You can devote a good chunk of your time to something you won't care about anymore down the line. Again, there is no regret for me in this, I will still cherish the time I spent caring about something. It's just weird to live in a world where that can be the only positive thing to say about something you adored not that long ago.