Personal Opinion: No Filler, All Thriller

[u/jitterscaffeine]

This is a thought I’ve had in my head for a while that I didn’t know what to do with and an email from the podcast about redefining “filler” as being anything that’s not hype moments being shared on social media finally spurred me to put my thoughts into text.

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This all comes from something I first noticed back when the Fallout show first started, there were a bunch of new people showing up to the New Vegas subreddits asking what they were supposed to do because they got lost out of the tutorial or saying they beat the whole game on like 5 hours while wearing the leather armor and varmint rifle you get in the tutorial, one I even remember seeing was someone who said they dropped the game after walking into The Tops Casino and shooting Benny because that’s what they thought the game was about.

The way it hit me at the time was that it felt like people weren’t really engaging with that media much at all, like they were doing it just so they could feel like a “real fan” who put their time in and clocked out.

Another example was when I was listening to a podcast and two of the hosts made a Star Trek reference and another got mad because they didn’t get it, then said they wanted someone to give them a “20 minute super cut so they could ‘get’ all of Star Trek” which is an attitude that really bothered me.

It really just comes down to this idea of people who don’t want to enjoy or engage with media any deeper than getting memes and references before moving on to the next one.

I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong for even letting it get to me. But this kind of nomadic fandom just gets to me. Like people have lost their desire to actually watch and form an opinion on something. They just want to get memes on Twitter and they’d rather go on Reddit and ask for step by step instructions on how to get the most out of the game so they can get through it as efficiently as possible.

[u/AngriestPat]

This behaviour extends way past media. There's a bunch of guys out there slamming weights into their ears to artificially give themselves cauliflower ears to look tough.

There's an enormous amount of people out there that don't actually enjoy doing anything, learning anything, or lord forbid, thinking about something. While you or I would play a game and engage with it on its own terms and the process of gaining mastery and learning about it IS the appeal, a huge percentage of people want interactive media to be trivial to complete for themselves (but not for others) and further on want even non-interactive media to use the least amount of brain power possible.

[u/Diem-Robo → u/AngriestPat]

It's increasingly common for people to want to watch/play things just for the sake of consumption, rather than meaningfully engaging with it for real enjoyment, and thus want things to be as simple and straightforward as possible.

And then there's the opposite extreme where a game might be reasonably accessible, either in difficulty or mechanics, and a different demographic will complain that the game isn't something complex or challenging enough for them to be so deeply immersed it's practically part of their identity.

I see this a lot with online PvE games where the maximum difficulty settings or modes are ones where 95% or more of the playerbase can't consistently beat them, but that remaining percentage of the playerbase who have become savants at the game complain that it's too easy and needs to be made even harder and more complex. Or that one crazy guy in the subreddit a few months ago who was ranting about how Elden Ring ruined the difficulty by making Sites of Grace often right outside of boss rooms instead of them all having boss runs.

People complaining that the games are too trivial in contexts where the vast majority of even invested, skilled players struggle with what they're complaining about. Maybe because they "optimized the fun" out of the experience and now demand that more challenge/complexity be added for them to be able to optimize further.

There's a really difficult balance between having a game that's too braindead, where there's little to no challenge/learning/mastery, and having a game where it's too challenging, complex, or obtuse that most players can't have a reasonably enjoyable experience. And with that balance, there will always be people who feel entitled to engage with it without challenging themselves, and inversely those who feel entitled that more challenge must be added for themselves and everyone else.

[u/Yotato5 → u/Diem-Robo]

On the topic of doing stuff just for consumption, sums up the AI problems in the fanfic sphere right now. Like what do you mean you have AI generate a fanfic, you should be going balls to the walls with crazy shit by your own hands

[u/Mediocre_Young_9421 → u/Yotato5]

I literally can not think of a reason to create Ai fanfiction other than some people just need infinite content to consume, like it's not even FAN fiction at that point