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Last year, a new film adaptation of The Three Musketeers came out. (French, Part 1, Part 2)
I watched Part 1 first; the fight scenes are amazing. The scene of the arranged duel between D'Artagnan and the three musketeers that turns into a brawl with the Cardinal's men is particularly fantastic. The style has a flavor of Cinéma vérité in that it's a continuous and somewhat shaky take from a point of view of an unseen witness who keeps turning to catch the action while ducking away from danger, but it deviates from Cinéma vérité in that everyone fighting is super-competent. In this seemingly-continuous shot, one catches glimpse of feats of martial arts moves, all geared towards dispatching the enemy, none are for show. It's very cool and impressive, and worth watching for that scene alone.
Every film adaptation makes decisions about how much of the original material to use, and how closely to stick to the plot. When it does, that's a deliberate choice on the part of those who made the film. Sometimes it's a little change: Porthos is bi; Constance is not married and yet runs a hostel while working in the queen's chambers. It's annoying to have such present-day sensibilities undermine the portrayal of a society very different from mine, but I figured that at least these changes didn't utterly contradict an essential part of the story.
And then I watched Part 2.
Milady from the book is one of my favorite villains. She is smart, adaptable, ruthless, resourceful, flawed, vicious, and above all feminine. She wields femininity as a weapon far more effective then mere swords and muskets. Why dirty your hands, when you can manipulate men to do it for you?
In this adaptation, Milady is a sword-wielding girl-boss.
When an otherwise-good adaptation takes an awesome feminine villain and replaces her with someone who might as well be a man, that's a deliberate choice. That choice dismisses the idea that femininity can be dangerous to one's enemies or efficacious for achieving one's goals. It's therefore ironic that the people who made this choice consider it a feminist move.
Fiction is not associative: strong (female character) != (strong female) character.
There is no good reason to ever watch or read anything made after 2012 and doubly so after 2016. There's enough great material to last you a lifetime from before then.
Also true of music, but arguably not true of videogames. While most AAA games continue to be disappointing, dumbed-down, DEI-addled trash, there have been some spectacular successes in the last few years. BG3, Factorio, Disco Elysium, RDR2, Rimworld, Sekiro, Stellaris, Crusader Kings 2 & 3, Doom 2016 and Eternal, etc.. Nintendo also producing some of their best work on the Switch (Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, Mario Odyssey).
I generally agree with BurdensomeCount, but I don't think he's trying to say there is literally nothing made after 2012 or 2016 that is worth your time. It's just that so much of it isn't, that the juice isn't worth the squeeze attempting to sift through it. Especially when you can just pick virtually anything that was considered "good" prior to 2012 and not find it offensively ideological. Compared to today where even the "good" games are often full of marxist or gender ideological talking points in degrees from "I can roll my eyes at this and get on with my day" to "My Disappointment Is Immeasurable And My Day Is Ruined".
My intuition is that films and TV have dropped off a lot more in the last 8 years than videogames, with some incredibly vivid and memorable successes very recently. While the Sweetbaby stuff has definitely tainted a lot of AAA games, the kind of games most affected are those that were mass-market slop anyway. I can’t think of many titles where it’s true to say “this would be great were it not for the DEI nonsense”.
I would suggest that the reason for this is that the total number of people designing video games is growing much faster than the same number producing TV and film*. If you had mentioned Stardew Valley and Dwarf Fortress, you'd have one- and two- man games, but Rimworld and Factorio are small groups heavily inspired by mods. The newest Factorio expansion came about because they hired a modder who did it for free. The dedicated auteur, working alone, is thriving in video games in a way that is not true for hardly anything else.
*The existence of the youtube professional is the comparable medium. These are episodes of TV, or sometimes movies, and they pay the bills. It isn't exactly high art, but this is where a similar sort of small enterprise is thriving.
I would argue that game devs are worse than ever, even the auteurs.
By way of comparison, I was listening to a podcast Dan Carlin did, talking to some boxing historian. And they mused over the fact that most athletes today are better than they ever were. I mean, just look at the records for any particular sport.
And then there is boxing. Boxers of old had a much higher pace of fights, as well as much more polished defensive capabilities because they didn't want to risk injury and losing their meal ticket. While a champion today might have 20 fights, a champion back in "the day" might have 200. Compare anyone who has competed in 200 events versus 20, and who is superior is usually obvious.
If you don't buy that argument, there is always the story of The Beetles, and how they played tens of thousands of hours of gigs before they emerged as The Beetles and went down in history.
Game devs these days might ship 2 games in 10 years. In the 90's it could be as much as 10 or 20. Look back at id software's pre-Wolfenstein days for Softdisk for instance. For a good chunk of the 80's and 90's, if you weren't on a yearly release schedule or higher, you were struggling. It wasn't until the late 90's that id software and Blizzard took on a "when it's done" attitude, but even that might be 2 or 3 years tops. Concord was supposedly in development for 10 years.
I would suspect that boxers and musicians of today lack something that old-time pugilists and rockstars had: chemical enhancement to aid that greater grind.
Games specifically take longer because they're often scoped bigger, are more complex, and the technology that builds them is more complex. In a few hours, one could crank out a barebones Mario-style platformer in 2D. Making that same game into a Metroidvania-style game would take an order of magnitude more time (let's say weeks). Make it 3D, and the time horizon for development extends to months at the minimum.
id Software managed the pace they did at Softdisk because their games were relatively simple, used simple graphics, weren't (yet) trying to push the limits of what was possible with computer games, and knew the hardware they were targeting (in the days before the Pentium and 3D accelerators). That Romero and Carmack were fairly skilled definitely helped, but in hindsight, you might not expect that looking at Rescue Rover or Dangerous Dave.
Games can be made in short timeframes like the old days, but you will notice the difference that lack of extra time makes. Go look at any game jam on Itch and play a few submissions, they're often very barebones, sometimes obviously crude, and typically quite short on content.
You think boxers used to be on more effective drug stacks than they are now? I'm quite skeptical of this for any sense of "used to", but particularly a sense of "used to" that includes, like, John L. Sullivan. For that matter, I'd be sort of surprised if it was true for musicians either.
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