In wtaching the Outside Xbox/Xtra crew doing their hypemeter reaction to GeoffCon, I was cracking up because Mike was the grumpy old man of the group. That’s how he always is during these kind of events. One year, he was saying, “Enough anime bullshit!” which made everyone laugh, but was actually kind of rude. This time, he put down isometric games, top-down games, games without guns, and basically anything that wasn’t a car game, a shooting game (or a game in which you blow up things), or the first half of a FromSoft game. Yes, I’m trhowing shade because he’s never finished one–that I know of. He hasn’t gotten past Biggie & Small in the first game, and he claims it’s because he doesn’t want to end the experience. I think, though, it’s more likely that he’s build it up so much in his mind, he just can’t get over the hump.
Anyway, he was snarking on so many games, his coworkers were getting a tad bit snarky about it in return. They were joking about how he just didn’t like anything, but they weren’t far off. And I get that it’s his shtick, but it got old pretty quickly. “Oh, I’m so funny hating on these games.” No, not really. You look…ignorant. I hate to say it because I really like him, but that’s the vibe I got. The team did call him out, though, for not knowing who ProZD was. I don’t think it’ cute for someone in the industry to hate on so many different games in so many different genres (and be like ‘who cares about content creators?’).
It got me thinking about my own impulse to naysay things. I like to think that I’m not as mean about it as Mike is, but I get the sentiment. I don’t care about most of the things that other people care about, but I don’t feel the need to be rude about it. Mostly, I keep my opinions to myself. If I’m asked, I’ll talk about my feelings on anything, but I’m not going to go around trumpeting them ad nauseam.
It’s funny. One time, I was having a convo about movies on the RKG Discord. I said that I was dumped because of my opinions about Pulp Fiction. People were intrigued. One said he loved the movie, but he wanted to know why I didn’t. I gave a very brief, but thorough summary of my feelings about the movie. He said that he found it fascinating, which was nice to hear.
That ex really warped my idea of what can and can’t be shared with others. Oh, the context is that I was dating a guy who said that was his favorite movie. I hadn’t seen it because I knew from the trailer that I would hate it. It was coming to the midnight theater or something similar, and he insisted I would love it.
Side note: I know myself really well. I know what I like and what I don’t. There has been one time I went into a movie thinking I would not like it and ended up loving it. That was The Royal Tenenbaums, but ti’s the only movie that I liked better than I thought I would. Normally, I hate a movie more than I thought I would or like/dislike it about as much as i thought I would.