Honestly I would argue that the quality of film and television stories has plummeted in the last 15 years to the point of them being a shallow husk that has been gutted by marketing and greed in the film industry.
Most films nowadays are glorified celebrity commercials with more product placements and wanky pop references than story beats.
Being directly in control of the main character puts you in a position to be more immersed in the world and more invested in the characters and story.
Not that the game industry is perfect but it has more going on than just the grids games. That’s the gaming industry’s greed. Live service games are a plague and the artificial padding is designed to sell you their micropayment currency. It’s a scam.
There are tons and tons of highly diverse games for many different skill levels nowadays that will introduce modern gaming concepts slowly and build up a players skill level. Not like the nes and arcade days of them wanting your quarters and making impossible to beat games.
If you need some recommendations on games with an impactful story or that give you an experience impossible with movies I can highly recommend these:
Journey, Outer Wilds, Spec Ops the line, Toem, Unravel, Kena bridge of Spirits, Night in the woods, Hifi rush, Donut County, Firewatch, The unfinished swan, Jusant, Gone Home, Venba, Dordogne, Hollow Knight, Knights and Bikes, Gorgoa, FAR: lone sails, a short hike, shadow of the colossus, bioshock, Spiritfarer
Great recommendations, I’ve only played about a third of these, I’ll dig in a bit!
Being a huge Movie and TV buff I’ll definitely push back on movies being shallow husks. The year is only half over and we’ve already gotten a bunch of exellent original movies. Love Lies Bleeding, Last Stop in Yuma County (favorite movie of the year), I Saw the TV Glow, Problemista, Challengers, Ricky Stanicky. Even the franchise stuff has been pretty good, Dune 2, Inside Out 2 and Bad Boys Ride or Die was tons of fun. Last year was even better, I think it was one of our best movie years in a long time. Oppenheimer, Past Lives, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Holdovers, Zone of Interest, Society of the Snow, All of Us Strangers, The Killer, Iron Claw, Boy and the Heron, Elemental, American Fiction. All original or adapted from a book. The earlier 2020s were a little softer because we stopped going out in public but even still we got Everything Everywhere, Aftersun, the start of the X/Pearl trilogy, Talk to Me, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Worst Person in the World and my favorite movie of the 2020s Pig.
TV as well. I feel like there’s constantly something well worth my time. In the same year (2022) we got some absolutely top tier television The Bear, Severance, Andor, The English, SAS Rogue Heroes and House of Dragon. Once again the past year has been full of excellent stuff Beef, Ripley, Shogun, Sugar, Bodkin, Baby Reindeer, The Gentlemen, The Curse.
I could go on like this for hours but the point I’m trying to get across is there’s a huge supply of good eating but if you only look to the biggest budget commercial products, you’re going to get big budget commercial products. I guess for me watching everything at the Summer Games show left me feeling a little bit empty. Except for Mixtape, that looks fucking sick.