Earlier this year, I started making more of an effort of going through my backlog, with a particular focus on games and movies, but there are also other achievements I wanted to tackle, such as improving my headstand — it is is better than it ever was, after weeks of practice, and it is now a part of my exercise routine. With regards to movies, I have been compiling a list of movies to watch but also a list of movies I have watched. This is not necessarily due to autistic traits, which I may or may not possess, but out of necessity. Let me explain with the example of the movie Taken 2.

I recall that I liked the original Taken. It was a perfectly serviceable action movie. As we live in the age of hypercapitalism, Taken was turned into a franchise, albeit there is little inherent franchise potential. The sequels are about as forced as the sequels of the Die Hard franchise. As I kept adding movies to my to-watch list, I came across Taken. I had no intention of rewatching the first movie, but I was surprised when I learned that there are two sequels.

A few days ago, I finally watched Taken 2. I did not have high expectations. Quite frankly, the movie did not engage me very much, so I used it as an analytical exercise. Then came a scene that felt familiar. It is about the daughter of the protagonist helping her father figure out where he is being held. The setup is quite unrealistic, which is probably why it got stuck in my mind. This particular scene I recalled, but I could not tell whether I knew it from a trailer or from having watched that movie years ago, and simply having forgotten the rest of the story.

I found it most remarkable that some movies leave almost no traces in your memory. In contrast, of some of the most impactful movies I have watched I could probably easily write down the plot and describe key scenes. The Terminator is an excellent example. Almost every scene is memorable, many of scenes are iconic, and the story telling is very good. Today, though, you watch a two or three-hour Hollywood movie and forget what it was about shortly after you have finished watching it. Just think of the Marvel comic movies! I have not watched many of them, but it seems that there is generally very little dialogue, or at least very little non-trivial dialogue, not much character development, and a lot of drawn-out action sequences, many of which do not add a lot to the movie.

The brain is a pretty efficient organ. There is the observation that as you get older, time just flies. However, the root cause is that if your life becomes too formulaic and you start going through the motions, your brain just does not store memories of that. This seems to particularly apply to moderately engaging office work. I had periods in my life of which I have hardly any memories because my work was not memorable at all. Six months get compressed to one or two interactions and that is it. If you want your life to be more memorable, it seems you need more variety. I have the most vivid memories of my time spent traveling and partying, simply because this was an extremely eventful time in my life. Probably years of working do not occupy more than a fraction of that space in my mind. Here, I am referring to the ancillary parts of my day-job, i.e. meetings and writing reports, not the main activities, which boil down to honing some technical skills, but even of these I do not really recall a lot of the actual work I have been doing, only my solutions to the more interesting problems I have faced.

Just as there are some movies you watch and forget so are there games you play and barely have any recollection of afterwards. The typical modern-day big-budget game takes thirty or forty hours, or more, but a lot of it is filler content. There are cynical psychological approaches such as frontloading the game by putting the major set piece into the opening hours, and not at the end, before you embark on dozens of hours worth of filler quests, and perhaps get a memorable set piece at the end. A great example are the God of War games, including the recent reboot. You have basically seen the best the game has to offer a few hours in. Now that digital storefronts like Steam offer a two hour refund window, game studios have an even bigger incentive to put some of the game’s best content right at the beginning.

Speaking of God of War again, I have the strongest memories of a particular boss fight of the second game, i.e. the fight against Euryale. Below is a video from the remastered version. I recall this game looking better on a small CRT, but for some reason people like upscaling 3D games, even when the textures and geometry clearly are not a good fit for high-resolution videos.

It took me several tries to beat this boss, more than any other in the game. Because this was a non-trivial challenge to overcome, I recall it well to this day, about twenty years later. However, in general, I do not remember all that much from God of War 2, apart from some set pieces like the fight against the Colossus of Rhodes at the beginning of the game, a cynical set piece that remains unmatched in scope and quality for the rest of the game.

In contrast, there are some classic games I recall very well. I can still quite competently play Super Castlevania IV. This is not the most difficult game, but it is not exactly a walk in the park, in particular once you enter the main castle, and some later parts are genuinely challenging. Yet, even after not having played this game for two decades or so. I recall replaying it in an emulator at around the year 2000, after having played it in the early 1990s, the time of its original release. There are some parts in this game you probably have to play repeatedly, and doing that leads to mastery, and also to forming a lasting impression.

Similarly, I used to play a lot of Street Fighter II on the SNES as a kid, in the early 1990s. A few months ago, I casually played the arcade version, and a few weeks ago I set myself the goal of trying to clear the game on one credit (1CC). I have now done so with Ryu and his mirror character Ken, and with other characters I have made pretty decent progress. I also played the SNES version quite a bit this year. To my surprise, I still had a lot of muscle memory regarding special movies, which sometimes require non-trivial input sequences, and I even recalled the main attack patterns of the various opponents. I managed to go beyond my childhood skills eventually, finding exploits for all four bosses so that I can now quite reliably dizzy them.

Classic video games are short and provide a very condensed experience. Modern games, in contrast, are drawn out. Some are not difficult at all, making them the videogame equivalent of fast food: easy to consume, but not at all nourishing. Nobody remembers dozens of hours of turn-based battles in old RPGs, but if you have sunk hours into trying to beat Dictator (M. Bison in the US version, Vega in the JP version) in Street Fighter II as a kid, decades can pass and you still know what to expect. Modern games do not give you this experience anymore, with rare exceptions like Dark Souls, a perhaps mechanically flawed game but one that dares to challenge the player. The same is true for movies. Flashy entertainment you forget about quickly.