| Counter argument: I disagree with most of what you say here. I think what impacts all people, regardless of age, is much less about the medium and much more about message. I disagree with the "medium is the message" idea being applied universally. Zelda Breath of the Wild has the same spirit as the Gameboy games, and the NES games. And before that, the same spirit of the games and fantasy books about knights, and forts with secret passageways made out of sticks and renaissance fairs. Super Mario Odyssey is a digital evolutions of the same kind of playgrounds and energy like jungle gyms, or tag, and running around and collecting things like hide and go seek or a scavenger hunt. Splatoon is like a soccer game, or an airsoft game, or any kind of childhood battle/skirmish game. Each of those types of games I think map to styles of play that are really, really old. I do think there is a message in the medium, though, and that the message is "we think this game/story is important enough to convey properly that we'll invest cutting edge technology to enable the best possible experience". I think each generation actually does in fact experience the same impact when that message is received. They way it is conveyed changes, because the cutting edge changes. You can tell when media hits that Goldilocks zone; it's not something frozen in any particular time. It moves and evolves. The Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings holds up. The original Star Wars holds up. The first James Bond holds up. The Wizard of Oz holds up. Metropolis holds up. Shakespeare holds up. Etc etc. You can trace stories back eons, and the ones that convey core messages about human experience in a time/era appropriate way are an essential part of how we think of ourselves. People who feel rooted and secure in their cultural context don't find the past contemptible, they are reassured and feel connected to an evolving set of stories. You can still see that with modern media. It will vary person to person, each cultural niche and personality type has a different Goldilocks zone preference. I don't think variety and saturation with more different forms of expression than we could dream of is actual sophistication. In a lot of ways it's actually more difficult than I think it's ever been to really convey a compelling story in a cutting edge manner. The army of people and resources needed to make a modern movie is insane, as it is for a cutting edge video game. I think that's leading to less sophistication, because the inevitable bureaucratic behemoths that are needed to create cutting edge story telling tends to kill off a lot of the best storytellers. The best story tellers should be more discoverable than ever, but it's increasingly difficult to plug them into these incredibly expensive projects. |
The general subject is remakes of old Disney movies. It's the same story in a new movie, making the message the independent variable.
Beyond that, we'd see vastly more radio programming aimed at kids if that was true. It's several orders of magnitude cheaper to create and distribute. What most people who don't work professionally in the A&E and Visual Arts fields don't realize is how much those visuals affect them. That's why they're so effective. The communicate deeply and viscerally in ways that aren't immediately obvious, but are incredibly powerful. That's why advertisers spend as much money as they do creating commercials with virtually no obvious story arc. We've already got most of the story in our heads and they're just pushing the buttons to activate it in ways that are useful to them.
> I do think there is a message in the medium, though, and that the message is "we think this game/story is important enough to convey properly that we'll invest cutting edge technology to enable the best possible experience". I think each generation actually does in fact experience the same impact when that message is received. They way it is conveyed changes, because the cutting edge changes.
The vast majority of adults don't take that much context into account when consuming media, even if they think they do... let alone children. Grandiosity is obviously a part of the message, but you just can't constrict the effects of visual communication to neatly defined categories like that.
Have you ever been listening to a song or watching video media or playing a game with someone nd they say "oh, this is my favorite part!" ... and you just don't get it? It triggers something in their brain that just doesn't connect with you. The difference between your perception of that media and theirs is the context in which it was processed-- your brain chemistry and all of your lived experiences and mood and pharmaceutical influences and thoughts and dreams and insecurities combined receive that stimuli and generate emotional responses.
> You can tell when media hits that Goldilocks zone > each cultural niche and personality type has a different Goldilocks zone preference.
You're putting things into buckets that aren't representative of the real world. Everybody can tell when media hits the Goldilocks zone because their own tastes define it. It goes far, far beyond personality types and cultural niches. Baby bear and Papa bear were likely perfectly happy with their porridge and Goldilocks liking Mama Bear's porridge didn't mean shit other than mama bear and goldilocks had narrow but overlapping heat tolerances.