Stop Telling me Stuff is Amazing

When I think of my favorite things in any medium, there is one major common factor. In every single case, I went into the experience not really expecting a whole lot. In movies, I went into 1985's Clue knowing almost nothing about it. The only thing I'd been told before going in was that Tim Curry was in it. My introduction to Zelda was actually a very scary one for six-year-old me. My friends had gotten to the second major section of Ocarina of Time where Hyrule Castle Town is overrun with Redeads. Fast forward several years and I picked it up for myself to give it another shot and loved it. I picked up Majora's Mask simply off of my enjoyment of the first game and playing the demo at a Target. Dark Cloud 2 I discovered quite a while after playing Dark Cloud and went in expecting a similarly clumsy, stiff game and was really surprised and endeared to the sequel. Terry Pratchett's Discworld was simply something that came up in searches as I looked for "books similar to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams."

In none of these cases did the item in question come to me highly recommended. No one gushed to me about how Ocarina of Time was the greatest game ever made or how Discworld was both an extremely humorous take on our own world's history and a sprawling fantasy epic that somehow made you care about characters that, famously, could be described very succinctly on a single index card. Every single time, I stumbled into my own love for the thing with the surprise and delight of finding it. Maybe being less connected in that time, both as a function of my age and the time in which I grew up, made those experiences more likely to find me as unexpected delights.

As I have grown older, I have noticed that my affection for new things has waned more and more. Perhaps it's that I've been around the block and have seen it all before, but more often I think about various pieces of media and how I hear about them. I have deliberately architected my life online to see as little advertising as possible. I use adblockers, I don't watch live TV. Every streaming service I pay for is one where ads don't exist or can be sidestepped with the subscription or via adblocking. Instead, I hear about new media from podcasts or word of mouth. This is both a benefit and a curse. On the one hand, I can look at people I interact with or listen to and find commonalities between my taste and theirs. I can use that to make decisions about what to play or watch next with some measure of certainty that the experience won't be a huge waste of time. On the other hand, a lot of folks who don't have a ton of practice describing media with a critic's eye tend to just say the same thing over and over again. "It's so good!" "It's the best!" "I cried so much!"

Before I continue, let me be clear. This is not simply a finger-pointing exercise. People do not need to be professional critics to talk about something. They don't need to be eloquent and verbose in their recommendations. I recognize that. I am simply describing my own fatigue with the problem, not suggesting a solution.

Whether I consciously try to account for this or not, what inevitably happens as I listen to these descriptors of a piece of media is that it becomes built up over time into a tier of quality that there is no possible way for the actual thing to overcome. Some of it is down to taste. I am not often moved to tears by media. It's something I just don't experience very often. I don't often call something the best in its genre or medium either. Some of that is an attempt to account for taste, but also I don't ever think of a game, movie, or anything else as perfect. There's always something to change or improve, even if it's small or even if it's not a core part of the experience.

I feel like my problem is three-sided. On one side is the folks pushing so hard that their favorite thing is a masterpiece. They build an expectation that cannot ever be overcome. On the second side, there's the lack in specificity. While mechanics are easy to describe and everyone kind of knows what someone means when they say "It's so pretty" or "The jump feels good," people generally have less vocabulary to describe the story or directing or writing style or what have you. While these first two sides are theoretically solvable by folks doing the recommending, or can be somewhat accounted for by the person being recommended the thing, this third side is where the biggest problems lie. It's the ruining of the surprise. By receiving a recommendation for a thing, you are being robbed of the surprise that the thing will be good. This is the one I really have no solution for. There's too many games, too many TV shows, too many movies, too many books to experience everything, so you have to filter somehow, and a better way to get more enjoyment out of a hobby than less is to follow recommendations, but then nothing is surprising. If someone says something is good and it is, then it's within expectations. Your brain files that away as "business as usual." not "A delightful surprise."

So in the end, my request is impossible. Tell me things are good. Try to describe why they're good. But also, maybe, sometimes say something amazing is just okay, or maybe interesting and I just might find it a delightful surprise and love it just as much as you.