When you’re young the odds are very good that you’ll find something to enjoy in almost any movie. But as you grow more experienced, the odds change. I saw a picture a few years ago that was the sixth version of material that wasn’t much to start with. Unless you’re feebleminded, the odds get worse and worse. We don’t go on reading the same kind of manufactured novels—pulp Westerns or detective thrillers, say—all of our lives, and we don’t want to go on and on looking at movies about cute heists by comically assorted gangs. The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again. Probably a large part of the older audience gives up movies for this reason—simply that they’ve seen it before. And probably this is why so many of the best movie critics quit. They’re wrong when they blame it on the movies going bad; it’s the odds becoming so bad, and they can no longer bear the many tedious movies for the few good moments and the tiny shocks of recognition. Some become too tired, too frozen in fatigue, to respond to what is new. Others who do stay awake may become too demanding for the young who are seeing it all for the first hundred times. The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new. And despite all the chatter about the media and how smart the young are, they’re incredibly naïve about mass culture—perhaps more naïve than earlier generations (though I don’t know why). Maybe watching all that television hasn’t done so much for them as they seem to think; and when I read a young intellectual’s appreciation of “Rachel, Rachel” and come to “the mother’s passion for chocolate bars is a superb symbol for the second coming of childhood,” I know the writer is still in his first childhood, and I wonder if he’s going to come out of it
Kael
here was speaking out against the lack of ambition in the movie industry; against the endless rehashing of simplistic movie plots, which, sooner or later, kills the interest in movies in every experienced viewer. What she craved was the same thing that any intelligent person craves from any medium or activity: more depth, more complexity, a steadily increasing intellectual challenge in other words, something to keep her brain power constantly engaged. And since the essence of movies is in their plot, she was in effect asking for more thoughtful, more intricate plotlines -- something beyond the "movies about cute heists by comically assorted gangs" that might have satisfied her in her youth, but could hardly be expected to do so for ever.
Getting back to games, and since the essence of games is not in their plotlines but in their rule systems, we see that asking for more complex games means asking for more involved such systems
