Giving Audiences More Respect

Perhaps this comes our generation's ever-shortening attention span, a motif that seems to come up in my blogs, but does anyone else think that some games deliberately aim at those lower standards? This goes beyond my previous entry on graphics and narrative.

I think this reflects a bit on the discussion we had in class Thursday, 2/15, about paratext and canon: what should be included in each category. This blog brings that idea to a more overarching sense of games and, for that matter, novels and movies: do authors deliberately dumb down their work to make their stuff more palatable to a wide audience?

I read a few online sites that often mention the declining state of movies. Movies are not made with the same quality that they were even in the previous decade. This may sound like grandpaw's argument about the good ol' days, when the world was full of heroes, but it seems to have some substance to it. Take the most recent attempt at romantic drama, and compare it to Casablanca. Does any of it stack up?

In almost every English class I've had, the professor will, directly or indirectly, refer to the declining state of the novel. Who is the great American novelist of our day and age? Stephen King?

Now I've been a gamer for a long while now, and games today seem to have less of a quality approach than they did a decade ago. I'll be the first one to say I'm wrong and I'm just acting like one of those nostalgic grandpaws. But could it have truth to it?

It's an inner debate I'm having with no clear-cut answer. If you guys have any comments, hopefully it will expand this sketch of ideas (which probably has one of those "art vs pop culture" lead ins written somewhere, which I did not necessarily intend) and lead to...well, something.