Oh my, I've been writing such a long thing again …
Source : The SWTOR forums :
There's an interesting thread called
Ludonarrative Dissonance and the Dismantlement of the Iconic Class Identities
which is in fact a topic that I think I have never seen discussed here at RPGWatch so far.
I mean, "Ludonarrative Dissonance" , has this ever been discussed here ? I do not remember.
And this is what I wrote :
Entertainment has come to this. CGI has only exacerbated the lack of depth to not only games but movies too. I mean, how many modern movies are as interesting and character driven as the movie Slingblade?
Slingblade worked with paltry funds, has zero special effects in it, and I find that movie watchable even now 20+ years after it was made.
I was looking at one of my favourite movies of the recent years - and yes, these days I mostly view only animated movies anymore [gramnmar ?] - "How to train your dragon".
Only after watching it I realized that it is one of the very few movies I've even seen in recent times WITHOUT having a violent conflict in narrative. It's even so that the protagonist doesn't have any kind of conflict at all - the movie is more or less kind of an psychological study. Relationship between manly father and unmanly son.
Don't know about the other two movies of that series.
I mean, it's a Dragon movie, and Dragons are all about nothing but POWER, aren't they ? I mean, in Fantasy, Dragons are normally used as examples of ultimate power. Nothing is as powerful as a Dragon in Fantasy. Nothing. At. All.
And that movie is about Dragons, but NOT about power. Curious.
I guess the metrics indicate that the majority of people crave intense, battle-driven thematic scenes and so that's what we mostly get now from the big studios. There's usually little substance, but tons of action and these movies are pulling in the most money.
The older I become, the less I understand whatz's so interesting with movies like Transformers, or Avengers and with Superheroes in general. Even as a kid, I found Superheroes boring, but maybe that's because I grew up with Asterix, Lucky Luke, Tintin, Nick Knatterton …
My current theory is that it really is an example of … movies for extroverts vs. movies for introverts. I don't have any other way of explaining what I see.
I once read that the U.S. society is a society in which being extrovert is something positive, something wanted. Maybe that's part of what made the fascination of the film "Rain Man". Maybe that's part of what's making people use "Autism" as an insult these days.
In an newspaper, I recently read an excerpt from an Autobiography (is this the right word ?) of an medicine scientist, one of the best brain experts of the world, the article said, about his failing to understand his autistic son.
During that excerpt, there was one remarkable passage : That he was using "scans" (don't remember the exact word for that anymore) to test for sensitivity. The result was, that the sensitivity of his autisic son was exeeding anything normal. Only then he realized 2 things : That his try to acclimatize his son to normal living by bringing him into loud, noisy towns with lots of smells, lots of people etc. had been overwhelming his son. That his autistic behaviour was hos try to shut out the whole world of "it's just too much OF EVERYTHING", to say it in my words.
The second thing he realized was that probably all autists are THAT over-sensitive.
So, Autists seem to suffer from the extrovert world, which is very much non-sensitive (the German language has invented the insulting word of "noticing-free", meaning "free of the ability to notice anything detailed").
From this perspective, the insult "he / she is autistic", often read in the PvP forums, gets another drive. It's the insult - or so it appears to me now - of rather extrovert people who cannot cope with the fact that someone os not extrovert - and especially not adhering to extrovert society structures.
Introvert people might make up half of society, but in a society with a bias towards extrovertism (does this word really exist ?) , they are just not seen, they are a mninority, because to please them, much more
substance would have to be put into movies, much more effort into details -> and the more money that's needed to spend, the less the profits are.
So, in the end, and this is my current theory, it's a matter of
extrovert movie -> less money spent = more profits
introvert movie -> more money spent = less profits
that locks out part of society. With games, with movies, with media in general. And let's hope it doesn't affect school too.