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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   2909 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 14, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Yes! And my younger cousins seem to agree. You speak of MMOs, but back then, the MMOs were special too. (Ragnarok, WOW)

IMO, media peaks in a certain era and you just have to accept it. New art forms appear to have a sweet spot at the intersection of maturity and novelty. That's when their best versions are created.

For example, take movies. They hit this sweet spot from 75-95. Jurassic Park, Rocky 1-4, Terminator 1-2, Die Hard, Shawshank, Godfather, Schindler's List, Star wars etc. There are equally great movies made after 95, but they don't have the same novelty. There are equally important movies made before 75, but they seem to lack maturity (of exploiting the art form). Afterall there are only so many stories to tell. There are only so many heart-strings to tug at.

For games, that happened between the late 90s - Mid 2000s. Half life 1 - Skyrim marked an era of special video games.

A telling sign of the end of this era is when authenticity takes a back seat to subversion & commentary. This is most stark with architecture. Mid-way through modernism (right after mid-century modern and at the beginning of Brutalism) Architecture ran out of authenticity. Sometime in an earlier era, Architecture had peaked and run out of novel ideas. So everything novel fails to evoke primal emotions and everything evocative is derivative. I see this trend with games. Where everything is about references, callbacks and subversive characters. It doesn't mean it can't be interesting or entertaining. Borderlands 1 & 2 did an amazing job at exactly this. But, it can't ground an era and wears-out-its-welcome quickly. Ofc, there are still great games (Souls-likes, Larian, etc), but ofc, they're derivative. Derivative works will never be as special as the 'the first'.

Over long time horizons, there are paradigm changes. As the core constraints and tools of a field change, it allows for novelty. But it can be decades of centuries between such paradigm shifts. Until then, a mature art form must languish between derivative and subversive.

On the topics of MMOs, nothing ever managed to match GW1 for me. Amazing build variety, deep mechanics with interesting interactions, easy to get into PvP, good, regularly updated balance, minimal grinding except for variety & visuals. Especially in retrospective it was far ahead of its time. GW2 was such a letdown in comparison, despite not even being a bad game in the grand scheme of things.

For comedy films, I don't think you can top the 2000s. The 80s and 90s were pretty funny, but nothing can beat Anchorman for mass market comedic appeal. And then in the 2010s comedies started to get self-aware and subversive in line with your thesis.

I don’t think it’s nostalgia. I’m playing Persona 4 for the first time now, and it’s fantastic. And it can’t be nostalgia, because I never played any Persona games growing up.

People were just less brainwormed back then, and it shows.

My only point of disagreement is with movies. Literature sure peaked a few centuries ago but the oslo trilogy or drive or many other post 2000s movies are just amazing. The Dune and John Wick franchises are better than movies of the past in the same genre because they do benefit from the higher budget and better tech.

As for games, perhaps like hacking, the more people did it, the worse it got even at the top levels. This is a statement my friends who are good hackers make, I am unqualified for now.

Literature as we mean in the common sense only really began in the mid 1800s and you could argue it peaked in that 1890-1920 period, or 1940-1960 period, or that it hasn't peaked yet, or is peaking now. This claim seems very fuzzy to me. Do you mean novels?

Film is the archetypal example of higher budget and better tech ruining an artform. High budgets means you can't afford to take risks, so every theatrical release is now a sequel or a remake of an established IP aimed at the lowest common denominator of American and Chinese teenagers. Better tech allowed the masterful animatronics and practical effects of the past to be replaced with green screens and CGI, with disastrous results.

What was the last truly great American movie? Probably the Lord of the Rings trilogy or The Last Samurai. No Country for Old Men is overrated. And the less said about the MCU and the Star Wars sequels, the better.

Is the lord of the rings American? Most of the cast is British and almost everyone involved in making of the movie is commonwealth.

What is American is the financing.

I agree that the trends you describe are observable (even if I disagree a bit with your dates) but I think an equally important factor is market conditions affecting budgets.

Middle budget is where an art form usually thrives and both for movies and games that category has almost disappeared. To be financially successful you now need to make a truly mass market game (probably with micro transactions) or develop something on a shoestring budget. The former almost always results in slop and the latter seldom has enough resources to truly shine.

I think you make a very good point about subversion and derivation. As I said in a different comment, you just can't make a game like Half-Life 1, because it's been done before. Even if you do it just as well again, it just gets looked at differently. It wasn't there first. The subversion and commentary thing also clearly defines why I think Earthbound is probably far better than Undertale (or maybe even Mother 3).

That being said, I think there's still a lot of room to do new things. You can make genuine stuff while doing some things that you wanted to see done that has never been done before. Undertale did some of that, though it's overridden by all the meta commentary that it did. There's a lot more room for play in video games than there is in movies, since a game can portray a lot more things and be a lot longer. Playing Earthbound is similar to playing LISA: The Painful RPG in mechanics, but there's a hell of a lot of difference in the nuances that I think let it stand on its own, even if it has a lot of flaws.

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