Sat 2025-03-22 18:10 EST

Context
=======

I argue with people on the Internet about video games a lot.

Sometimes it's about the most optimal way to play a game I'm fairly
familiar with (though these are more like fun gameplay discussions
than arguments). Sometimes it's about games or parts of games that I
don't like (though that's just subjective, so it's more me talking
about myself and what I like than about the game).

Oftentimes, though, it's about the story of a video game, and not
only whether it's good or not, but why it's good or bad. And it's
very, very frustrating, because people somehow just don't understand
context.

I'm not sure why this is, but it's been very dificult to get people
to understand that, in video game stories, and in stories of any kind,
in any form of media, things happen because things previously
happened, and the thigns that happen at one point affect what happens
at other points. In other words, a story is not a set of disconnected
events. It's a connected _whole_.

But people don't see it that way. If something happens in a scene
that they don't like, they will either call the character stupid, or
call it bad writing, or just act confused. The answer to their
question, however, is in the preceding scenes of the story. The things
are happening in the context of these other things happening. It all
works together. But the critique focuses on the single scene, and not
the piece of media as a _whole_.

And this is odd, because that feels like a very basic, middle school
English class level critique skill. It sounds like a question on a
school exam. "How does the way the characters acted in this scene
relate to the information they received in the previous scene?" or
something like that.

I've heard that there are problems with the education system that
cause this, that students are only taught through exceprts and not
full books, or that young people are not reading books on their own.
This may be true. But then how do we teach this? I can only say "This
will make sense if you look at it as a whole" and heavily emphasize
the "as a whole" so many times before people will get tired of hearing
it. But it needs to be said, and taught, because it seems like, to me,
the biggest problem people have regarding media literacy, and it's an
extremely simple concept, so it should be an easy fix. Maybe.