I love video games but I also really love film. I went from playing Silent Hill games to watching films like Jacob's Ladder, Lost Highway, and Session 9. I've been watching a lot more films lately. David Lynch is one of my favorite filmmakers right now. I guess most of my life I was watching the wrong films. Even today lots of great films are still being made, you just need to wade through lots of shit to find it. For every great film, there's probably 10 shitty cash grabs. Cough, cough Minecraft Movie.
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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I've never been a movie person, always preferred video games. Besides, many video games are like movies these days, but you interact with them.
I'm a millennial but same.
Movies suck ass right now. And honestly videogames too.
Videogames have replay value though so I can stick to the good ones from the past.
Movies have rewatch value up to a point.
Make a movie we want to see and we'll watch it.
I wouldn’t even say that movies suck right now, I just have a hard time giving attention to something for 2hrs straight with no form of interactivity.
A lot of AAA games may suck right now but there's so many awesome indie games that it's hard to care.
To me it's even simpler than that. Games are by design more engaging than movies, so I chose to play games.
It will change, believe me. I have less and less energy to play video games each year.
I'm almost 60 and I play almost every day.
Not all video games are twitch shooters.
Peak millenial spotted. It gets better once you get older I was told lol
About to turn 51. Same.
I mean, games are like interactive movies now. RDR2? Cyberpunk 2077? They’re great fiction and you get to be the main character. I was never a gamer, I would play here and there but could never play more than like an hour a day. Now? Especially the two games I mentioned, it blew my mind how much I could play those games. They’re excellent pieces of media.
Have you tried kingdom come deliverance?
Hell yeah. And we get to shape our own stories this way. Game writing is different than movie writing. We get to express values.
So true…
I'd still rather play video games than watch a movie, and I'm in my 40s.
I'm rapidly approaching 40, but I'm there too.
Most "normal" people see watching a movie or playing a game as a passive experience, you're "doing nothing."
For me that couldn't be more wrong. I almost never "just" watch a movie or show, that's wayyyy too passive for me. Playing a game is engaging, you may not be physically running around, but you absolutely are "doing something."
That's what I've been saying for years. It's an entirely different activity that happens to involve blankly staring at a screen
Can confirm. They just leave the room. Even if they are half way in.
Even when I watch something there is a game open in my hands or on another screen.
What's the max age of someone in Gen Z? Because when I was a kid, this was definitely true for me too.
Gen Z's are people born between 1997-2012. So the oldest Gen Z is now 27 years old.
I wonder if this might be related to the idea that modern media consumption habits are potentially trashing people's attention spans
No, it is just human nature to want to do things they find more engaging. For most people games are more engaging than movies which are more engaging that books. Younger people are just more likely to have experience with all three.
I'm not sure it can just be that though, millennials have experience of all three too, why does the trend apparently exclude them?
I will sometimes pick a game, sometimes a movie, sometimes a book—all can be equally engaging IMO
Took way too long to find it in the actual report (page 12 of https://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Essential-Facts-2024-FINAL.pdf)) but it is 63% Gen Z, 55% Millenials, 33% GenX, and 14% Boomers. Nothing is being "excluded".
And the trend makes sense. GenX and older Millenials were the tipping point where games went from "for losers" to "for everyone". But also? GenX and Millenials have families and careers. Playing a game gets a lot more difficult when you have kids swarming around whereas putting on a movie is something the whole family can enjoy. Same with just not wanting to touch a computer "of any form" (and ignoring that your streaming box is also a computer...) after a long day of work.
Gaming was more popular and more accessible when Gen Z was growing up, so probably more of them developed a preference for it.
The article doesn't mention Millennials at all, but the video game market jumped over the box office before Gen Z was old enough to play games.
Yeah. Its immediate gratification.
You can get into a cod or fortnite game in less than five minutes from boot to boots on the ground. You can get into a fight in an open world game in even less time. And so forth.
If you aren't into the (delightful) love story? The (extended cut) Fall Guy is 20 minutes to the first stunt and about 45 minutes to the first fight scene. Personally? I think the movie would have benefited from even more time with Ryan Gosling just crying to some t swizzle in the car but it (like Drive, another spectacular Gosling film that nobody but me likes) was marketed as an action movie and people are going to just take out their phones or their gameboys if you make them wait that long.
Its similar logic to "I don't have time to watch a 90 minute movie tonight. So instead I'll watch six episodes of a tv show"
I think instant engagement is a better description than instant gratification. Some books, movies, and games can pull off quick engagment but a lot have a gradual buildup as well. A gradual buildup with audio, visual, and active participation is just easier to become engaged quickly.
Some games do have rapid engagement on subsequent plays like you mentioned, although I would say COD has a pretty slow engagement for me when it starts up after an update and makes me watch those short background clips I don't care about. Much slower than the cold open on good comedy shows or the opening scene of Jurrasic Park.
On the flip side many people put 100+ hours into a single game and a movie lasts maybe 2. Games can have delayed gratification too.
Millennials grew up with some pretty awesome movies. Gen Z and Alpha grew up with some pretty awesome video games. Makes sense.
Gen X grew up with awesome movies and games...
We had good original games growing up, but modern games are designed to be meth-adjacent levels of fun for kids.
Damn right. And music.
Games are interactive, movies are passive. Makes sense to me.
And there are some games which are basically interactive movies, e.g. Last of Us and Life is Strange
Also, there's the cost and community aspect of games. For the price of a movie ticket and popcorn, I can buy a game that I can play with friends for easily dozens of hours instead of us silently sitting next to each other for an hour or two.
With the increasing death of third places and the increasing cost of existing outside, video games have become their own sort of third place for people to get together and just hang out.