Notgames Forum

I started to feel very bored by emotions in media or art like movies, games, books. I watch a movie or film,
and the story makes me feel sad or happy or sometimes angry. They play the audience like an instrument.

I don't like it.

You can't have a mainstream experience without it. I wonder, why I should feel sad,
when watching a movie? I reserve my sadness and my other emotions for my real life.

They are second-hand emotions.

I look for books, movies etc. which don't have their primary goal set to manipulate their audience emotions
or feelings. Art that speaks to the mind, rather than to the stomach.

That's why I love early and late Greenaway, why I love Oulipo and Georges Perec, and Béla Bartok. Why I love
puzzles more than mysteries, and why I love mysteries more than psychology.

I don't know if the purpose of art today should be to create emotional response anymore.
This is now so ubiquitous, that I don't care anymore.

Don't give me second-hand emotions. Don't give me even first-hand emotions.

I agree to an extent. A problem I've had with cinema is the lack of ideas. Film has a serious problem communicating concepts, if they try at all. The emphasis is always on emotion and drama, as if that is the only thing worth communicating.

Another contemporary criticism is "beautiful but lacking content". This goes for games and cinema. Isn't beauty enough?

also, why do want games to become like Hollywood blockbusters? For the money, right. But they want to tell the same emotional stories like boring Hollywood movies. When was the last time a game made you cry like a movie, they ask, without realising that crying in a movie is not important at all.

In my experience, provoking emotion is never the goal of art. The goal of art is to touch the universe. In a way that science and philosophy cannot. Sometimes this happens through or alongside emotions. But even then, they are just a means to an end.

But many games and films are simply predators on our emotions, with no other purpose.

"the immanent transcendence of play" - as Gadamer says ...

But, why is that bad? I mean, emotion is an essential part of the human experience. This is what we are.

Human nature is such that, when faced with too much of one thing, to swing the pendulum over to the opposite, when in fact the mythical middle path would truly offer the best of all things.  I bet if you were inundated only by "art that speaks to the mind", you'd then have a desire to feel something.

I know that is true for me. But does it apply to all? How explain the desire for more of the same, then, in a large part of the audience?

I think you have to pull your frame of reference back a bit, and see the ebb and flow of movement and counter movement in public opinion to see that pendulum.  Gaming doesn't really have enough history yet to see this emerge though. 

It could be because, apart from a relatively small 'hardcore' part of the audience, people don't really play that many games so they don't particularly care if they're all pretty similar.

According to this article only 8 games have been sold per xbox 360 and 5.3 per PS3 which isn't necessarily enough for them to start getting bored of seeing the same things over and over in videogames. (Although those statistics may have changed a bit now since the article is 4 years old.)