Why I Prefer Games to Movies (and TV)

It's about depth

These days, when I want to either relax or be entertained, movies and TV shows are not what I prefer. While I like movies more than TV shows, I don’t hate either one. It’s just that in order of preference, I much prefer a game to a movie. I have come to a few conclusions as to why.

The main reason is that games offer a deeper experience than movies.

A deeper experience. Not a richer experience, nor a more emotionally powerful experience, but a deeper experience.

Passive visual media is a shallow, often overwhelming approach to communication where all control is given to the movie maker and not to the consumer. Actors speak at a certain pace. Visuals are shown from a specific angle for a specific amount of time. The story progresses in a specific, set way, and the entire thing takes a set amount of time.

Games are the opposite of this. The player has control over how fast the game progresses, how it does so, where he moves in the digital environment, what he looks at, etc. It is more like walking down a gallery in a museum, with an aesthetic experience that is somewhat malleable to the viewer and his own desires. He can stop and stare or move quickly past whatever doesn’t interest him. He has choices as to which rooms he wants to visit.

The player, even in on-the-rails games, has freedom as to how the experience plays out. This produces a deeper, more focused interaction with the medium. It is not uncommon for Skyrim players to stop and stare at the scenery and listen to the music, and at the opposite end are speed runners whose intense, deep focus is directed toward mastery of performance rather than introspection. The medium has room for these extremes and everything in between, and sometimes in the same game.

This is contra to the boomer belief that kids’ attention spans are wrecked by games or their neurons are burned out by overstimulation. Rather, games are engaging because they offer depth of experience and invite (or require) focus, not because they are phrenetic supers-stimulators. A master chess player exhibits intense focus and interest in his game, but when we add an aesthetic dimension in the form of graphics, it becomes some sort of cultural problem.

Nowadays, I look at the people who prefer basic visual media (especially TV) over games or books a bit negatively. It takes a certain state of mind to passively accept images without thinking about them, and it is disturbing how quickly certain people can collapse into the receptive state with no mental defense and how long they can endure the onslaught of images and political messaging. One thing I have come to love about watching films at home is the pause button, which I use not because I am bored but because I like to take time to think about what I am seeing. Watching a movie without ever considering what the director was trying to do seems spiritually dangerous to me. It is akin to how I read books, where I frequently pause to consider what I have read and muse over the technique or the meaning.

It is small wonder that passive visual media has been the spearhead of propaganda since 1950. It is also of interest to note how quickly gaming enthusiasts have picked up on and pushed back against propaganda in games since 2014. The deeper experience has the potential for more effective propaganda, but at the same time, the focus required also forces the mind to engage more with what is there.

That is, most of the time. WoW players are still blissfully skipping all the quest text, so they miss the propaganda by pure ignorance, their focus being entirely on playing the game. Gameplay itself is a major benefit to any game because if it is engaging enough, problems with either graphics or story are quickly forgiven. It is comparatively more difficult to make a satisfying movie because all the effectiveness has to be achieved through the intent and talent of the people making the film. Meanwhile, World of Warcraft was the most memorable experience ever because of unplanned interactions with other players. Most veterans of early WoW, the heyday of emergent gameplay, couldn’t care less about the “character arcs” of the NPCs.

Gaming represents a potential for all the diverse experiences a player would want. There is the aesthetic experience created by the visuals and enhanced by the agency of a player-controlled view of the game world. Music is present, not in the form of tightly controlled cues like in the movies, but as complete pieces that fit the mood and aesthetics of a scene. I much prefer game soundtracks to movie soundtracks, as the latter tend to sound disjointed and without formal organization because their form is tied to events in the movies. The gamer is involved in what he sees and what happens, so he is actively thinking about the possibilities and meaning of what he sees and hears. Games have acting and writing, too, but it is the gameplay—what makes a game a game—that gives the medium its depth.

A game could be a relaxing, simple experience like a walking simulator that, although maligned by some parties, does fill a role. It could be a book with voice acting and images, like a visual novel. It could be an intense thinking exercise, like in a strategy game. It could be intense and frantic, like a fighting or souls-like game. Games can even facilitate exercise, as in many VR titles. A game can contain multiple variants of these extremes as well. Final Fantasy games tend to be action and then cut scenes, a constant alternation of the active and passive, which is unique among media types.

There is a flip side to this deeper experience as well, which is that it can be addictive, particularly if there are addictive elements in a gameplay loop, such as random rewards. Games can serve as “surrogate activities” for people, giving them a sense of accomplishment for overcoming challenges that point toward nothing real. Ranking up in a game can take the place of ranking up in the real world and damage a player’s drive to perform well in professional and personal endeavors.

I temper these warnings with a redirection: for many people in our society, there are very few opportunities to experience what Cal Newport called “Deep Work” and few opportunities to achieve and advance through one’s own skill or cleverness. Both manual and corporate careers have fixed velocities (especially if you do not switch jobs frequently) and do not fulfill the need for meaningful, challenging, or creative work. They are drone tasks, and to that effect, games might be one of the few hobby activities that supplement our materially rich yet spiritually poor world in a way that brings joy.

It’s not all black and white. The idea that games waste your time or life, a conceit usually flopped out on social media by conservative talking heads like their burgeoning guts, doesn’t really stand up without a fair bit of special pleading. Time is always limited, but a kid playing a game is not wasting his time any more than a boomer watching cable news and is probably enjoying himself a lot more. Reading books is usually given a pass on the “you should be doing something productive” argument, but that is due to special pleading driven by the belief that people aren’t reading enough and getting stupider. Of course, the publishing industry wants all reading to be promoted since they sell books, but not all books offer intellectual improvement. You aren’t bettering your situation by reading Harry Potter or Janet Evanovich books—to say much less over the bodice-rippers that 40-something “bookaholics” chug down like their cheap wine. The people who read Aquinas don’t do it because “reading is good” but because they seek understanding of something he wrote about.

Yes, there are things that you can do with your time that are good for you or good for others, and there are things you can do with your time that are for personal enjoyment and satisfaction. Games are a leisure activity, and there is nothing wrong with that.

This reminds me of an oft-repeated complaint among MMO players: the game feels like a job. By this, they mean they are having to do many repetitive, shallow tasks in order to compete and gain access to the deep, challenging endgame. In essence, the game becomes a fractal minim of their regular life, where they work all week in a boring job to have leisure time to play a game. When an MMO is really cooking good soup, when it becomes not just fun but addictive, it is because it is what work is supposed to be. It is fun, engaging, challenging, satisfying, and there are constantly new things to learn and master. This is why MMO expansions invariably focus on the endgame: players want to get back to the zenith of what the game offers in all of those regards.

When it comes to the feeling of killing an endgame boss, maybe one only a few players have seen… Well, movies just can’t compare. The high is higher because there is just more to a game than a movie.

All this is not to say movies or TV are bad mediums, but mediums I prefer less than a game. If I have two hours of leisure time to myself (rare these days) and can choose whatever I like to do, I will choose a game every time over a movie. I choose books over movies, too, for similar reasons. Books engage more of the mind and therefore produce a more profound effect if they are good. I am not the kind of person to ever want to “turn my mind off” and consume any form of media. I prefer to sit and listen to music with intent, not just put it on in the background (though I do that, too). Watching something to “relax” is not something that makes much sense to me except in certain circumstances (like trying to prepare for sleep). That’s why most of what I watch in video form is YouTube. It’s informational. There is a comment section that offers additional ways to engage with the material. When I watch movies, it tends to be with an analytical mind, which, by the way, makes me enjoy them more.

So, I will still watch movies, but I will not call myself a cinephile now; I prefer other things more. There are still good stories on screen, to be sure, and films are still the easiest form of media to discuss with regular people. If you want to find a common experience with a stranger, chances are you have watched some of the same movies. They remain the touchstone of our modern culture, for good or ill. That may change with time, but even now, though it is a rarer experience, meeting a person whose common experience is a game yields immediately a deeper connection. There is usually a lot more to discuss.

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