Ahhh, "The Void" stared into ya. I get that with games, albums, and movies a lot. Kind of bittersweet because it ruins you, but really only does so by being that much further past whatever reference point you had going in. So it basically goes like... through it all, you have this big epiphany about the whole exchange with the art... and everything else kinda turns to shit. It shows you how much better everything else wasn't.
For a while it's just like nothing can compare, and at the same time you can't just go back to it because it becomes sort of sacred. You kinda can't let yourself squander its goodness... there's some guilt involved in doing that.
I don't know if you watch a lot of anime, but "The Void" is basically cannonical in many circles and is probably the reason why anime fans are often super-collectors. They saw something that changed thier whole world so much they just want to be surrounded by it as much as possible. Because it's so novel and different to your average westerner, the classics have a certain way of overturning people so that they forget what life is after watching - they undergo rapid radicalization. And since you can only watch something so many times, 'stuff' inevitably becomes the answer. It's as though somehow things make more sense when you can find other ways to engage with it.
Sometimes I think that feeling is just fandom exiting the embryonic stage. You think about people who get REALLY into something. Like, they have people they like to talk about it with, they have the merch, they learn the trivia... they bring in all of these things orbiting directly around the subject of their obsession, none of which are
that thing. That highlights the need for more of that thing, right? In a way you could say a fan is someone looking to fill the holes blown in their brain by whatever it is that impacted them so deeply.
Video games, I think are a bit different though, just because of the immediacy of that interactive component, and the time available to spend forming those connections. More opportunities to get closer to the art are simply built into gaming by nature. Because of that quickness and depth, it's also easier to have that feeling with more stuff. You can essentially recover by playing more games. It's harder with movies and especially with music. With music, I find after experiencing certain stuff, things are just never the same. Anime, I pretty much haven't been able to watch in years just from that feeling totally burning me out - like The Flight of Icarus. I have just seen so much of the best ever and with only so much being possible with it, can't help but compare. Really good games, I eventually move on from. I think it helps that as technology expands, the experiences are continually revolutionized. We consider music and film of the past fully on-par or better than current stuff, right? Because fundamentally the way the experience is delivered doesn't change that much. Not so much with games. Nobody would say a game from the 80's is as good as the best games now, because it's a medium that can continually grow and adapt in huge ways. So many totally different experiences have been possible at different times.
But really I think it's mostly just because in order to interface with them at all, you have to have tangible interaction. You don't just sit and watch or listen. That's what makes them so good at sucking people in.
I have tried explaining this to older people who never got into it and they don't get it - how differently powerful fully interactive entertainment can be. To them, it's just work. Their loss, I suppose. Some games offer experiences that can't be had any other way.
All that stuff aside, ME is definitely one of those. Shit man I haven't played it in a while and it STILL gets me sometimes. I'll be going to play something when for whatever reason I start to think back on those early playthroughs of Metro, sigh internally, and think "Yeah, but it still won't be like that..." That was pretty much entertainment experience of the year for me when it came out. Easily. And I'm not sure if anything since has really reached me like that yet. Definitely a big fan... in fact, I could really use some Metro stuff for my desk
