I feel like when I first started reading gaming sites in general, the sentiment was gameplay over graphics/experience. that was around 2004 or so. Even on gaf whenever I started reading that. I'm still like 98% into gameplay, 2% the rest, with a couple of art style deal breakers (lolis.) I can't accept this as me becoming an old man and not keeping up with the times or something because writing and VA are still both about the same as back then--awful. I don't even have a standard in mind. Deadly Premonition is awful, but at least it has its own identity and rips off something interesting. A lot of these games are just dude's struggle set to orchestral music.
9 times out of 10, many flaws are ignored and big exceptions made in order for the game's story and cinematics to rise above. A lot of times the gameplay is completely discounted, almost like someone has bought two products-- a game and a shitty movie that plays throughout the game. All of Columbia attacking John Bioshock throughout the course of that game is just jarring. As a whole, it's objectively bad in terms of story-telling. You MUST totally discount the gameplay in order to make Bioshock Infinite make sense-- almost every part of it is a video game where the things on screen are enemies that you deal with, who aren't trying to mimic real life in any way--they're shit to kill. Tomb Raider is the other great example--goddamn they wanted your emotions so badly, but they made a regular mass murder TPS, which reveals itself about 10 minutes into the game.
Then there's other stuff where jillions of dollars have been poured into the project, but the story, whether it's in a game or not, is just completely terrible--Assassin's Creed.
The Citizen Kane-seekers think that if they lower their standards enough (and if they've been gaming without thinking critically for 20 years, only stopping to take in some comics and shitty movies, those standards are at the bottom of the ocean) the things that blow them away can suddenly be held up as a great work that stands up in comparison to any other media.
What's frustrating for me is that gaming has its strengths, but they are more difficult to talk about. Think about how shallow gameplay talk is on most forums. It's tough to put into words what's enjoyable without resorting to generalities. But I think the only area in which modern gaming is really "itself" compared to other media (which all have unique identities of their own that gaming co-opts) is in gameplay. Gameplay should be the thing that gets picked apart critically, while all the cinematic stuff gets generalized as "world building" with the connection between the two just being how the game world facilitates gameplay interaction.
Otherwise, you're stuck chopping up games into little segments, totally throwing away the pieces that don't fit, and left with a bunch of elements that basically reduce games to shitty movies.
Not to say someone can't like games for their cinematic/experience elements, but the guys who are trying to claim "masterpiece" on certain titles just do it in the least honest way possible.
It reminds me of crazed comic book geeks in so many ways that it's not even funny. Most people are cool with comics and videogames from my experience, it's just that the stigma stems from one thing and one thing only: being a creepy self obsessive nerd. Creepy self obsessive nerds don't realize that nobody actually hates them for liking videogames, but cause they are creepy and obsessive about it. And they think "legitimizing" videogames would suddenly make their dads less disappointed in them and have women fling their panties in their direction. While I do think games can be considered art, the whole "Videogames are art!" argument obviously wreaks of nerdlingers trying to justify all the wasted time. It's the main reason most human beings either don't care or don't take it seriously.
Nolan Batman!
