The word you're looking for is "middlebrow". And I think you're right on the money. The range of discussion here appeals to players who like to think of themselves as informed and discriminating, in the form of staying plugged into what's scoring over 90 on Metacritic, what's charting in Japan or NPD, what's performing at 60fps, who said the latest outrageous thing to merit a boycott or a firing, what's the latest word from the verified insiders in the rumour mill—all things we can lean on to pat ourselves on the back for being tasteful. It helps if we actually like the games, of course, and we often do. But in the end this is just one niche among many in a large-scale commercial market, and we're all in the thrall of big business. (Yes, even those of us who mostly play the indies.)
I'm not saying this a bad thing—I'm here in the pit with the rest of you, after all, and it's nice to be in a place with enough of a shared basis in history that you can name-drop Kamiya or Suda51 without having to explain who they are, and chuck all kinds of acronyms and abbreviations around that are instantly understood—but it all reminds me of a lot of what put me off about online film circles a long time ago: they'd be full of people who believed themselves to be highly tasteful, championing a few award-winners and well-known auteurs and lesser-known productions that were still fundamentally very populist in their tone, genre, or accessibility, and at the end of the day, they all gravitate back into heated conversations about Christopher Nolan or Peter Jackson or the MCU, because that's where they really have opinions. You'd find very quickly that they didn't have the mettle for anything truly adventurous that didn't already have a stamp of prestige or expectation, and worst of all, that even if they did know everything about film, they knew very little about anything other than film. You would run into so many people who think of themselves as snobs, and might even want to be snobs, but who really didn't have the cultural literacy, in or out of their medium, to truly be snobs.
It's why I abandoned the games-as-art conversation years ago. (Juvenile, hysterical arguments for games as art have done more than anything in the world to persuade me, for the slightest moment, that games might not be art.) The base for "prestige" video games is way too populist, and far too in denial about it, to treat subjects like "art" and "story" with the nuance they deserve, in a way that doesn't degenerate in seconds. Maybe that's exciting when you're twenty and new to all this; maybe that's still exciting if you never outgrew it. But perhaps it's enough to enjoy the mass commercial entertainment we do—most of which is honestly pretty competent and polished even when it's utterly bland—and justify it to ourselves in some way that seems to come down to communicable objective properties and not pure, personal, solipsistic, inexplicable taste.
That's what polls like this achieve, along with this discussion board as a whole. And I'm resigned to that. Some of you are a lot of fun to read, there's just enough overlap in what we play that we can feed off each other, and there's just enough difference in what we play that being here introduces me to new things. It's enough to keep me coming back, as someone who is frequently pretty far out of the local norms.
