Real enthusiasts and a fan of a film will watch it over and over again.  What you have with videogames is that you get X hours of gameplay out of it, before you are done with it.  But also there isn't like $60 a pop to go see a movie.  With these costs, the "hours of gameplay" comes up as a benchmark of something.  Only other place maybe comparable is seeing a play, but you are paying actors to put on a live performance.  In this, "hours of entertainment" just isn't there.  And the videogame industry basing a videogame off a movie based off a naval boardgame was summed up PERFECTLY when they turned it into a first-person shooter.  WAY TO GO ACTIVISION!  Make Pitfall Harry proud, won't you?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johngaudiosi/2012/05/20/220-million-battleship-flop-sinks-not-only-universal-pictures-but-activision-game/

It annoys me when I read comparisons between the gaming environments of today and yesterday where people dress up the past and turn it into something that never existed.

Sorry, but gaming was never run by Unicorns and Magical Ponies.  It was always a business.  Publishers have always been draconian, out to make money however they can.  Remember when you bought a game not knowing if it was going to be fun or if the developer had simply thrown code at a screen in order to make a quick and easy buck?  Yeah, that happened a lot.

Nothing has really changed.  It's just that now we read about it 24/7 because of the internet.

I've been into gaming since my father brought home an Atari 2600, since I bought an NES with my birthday and Christmas money.  As far as I can see, we have far more quality across the board now.  If you push out a low quality product now, people hear about it and avoid it, where in the past you were just taking a guess half the time that the game would even work.  We have so much more variety now, and I love it.  Endless combinations of platformers, beat 'em ups, and side-scrolling shooters once had me bored to death with console gaming, before I discovered RPGs and PC gaming.

As far as the constant complaining about games having stories now, I think that annoys me the most.  I like it.  I like it a LOT.  The shallowness of the past was another reason I started to strayed from gaming, before the PS1 came along.  IT'S SOMETHING I LIKE.  You don't have to like it.  God knows, I'd be fine if I never played another platformer in my entire life but I don't go around complaining about them.  There are TONS of genres now, with more than enough games for everyone to be happy.  If you don't like games that include storytelling then bloody well play something else.

The industry as a whole, can't even support its own TV station.  Anyone who has even a remote bit of competency (let's use Adam Sessler as one possible example) is reduced to going on the Web and hoping to get enough views.  And there is no score for competency, or financial reward. What there is rewarded is the ability to generate attention, and that is it.  Can you entertain?  There is no professional critique of anything, just analysts writing reports for industry insiders.  If they have some camera presentation, and marginal knowledge at least, they end up like Pachter... and probably marginally glorified and referenced as something to get hits.

On the note of this thread, I am thinking this latest Zero Punctuation review of Dead Space 3 seems to sum up the state of the videogame industry, or at least what is seen as some of the high points (and yes, the review is generally negative):

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/6891-Dead-Space-3

Let's kill off a genre piece, bland it out for mass market, and get people to buy it.  After all, we have to hit a 3 million sales total target in order to break even.  It is the mindset that produced the movie Battleship, based on the boardgame.  So, no, I am not glorifying the movie industry later.  They seem to be increasingly infected by the same ailment as the videogame industry.  But hey, the videogame industry wants to be like Hollywood?  Ok, now they can.

I do find that the more invested a gamer is in the gaming industry, via obsession with their online accomplishments, the more "lacking" they are in the real world, as gaming can be used as an escape mechanism for the real world. The coolest poster or most skilled online gamer that logged hundreds of hours more then you.....chances are you are more successful when the computers/consoles are turned off.

While I think you are painting an overall too gloomy view of gamers and the gaming industry many of your points are valid.

I will say however what you see on the Internet and in forums is in no way reflective of the general gaming community. Ive worked in the gaming industry for years on the retail side and most gamers are normal sensible people. Most people in forums aren't a good representative of the average gamer.

There is demands being placed on the industry by a core audience, plus a resentment of other entertainment and art mediums for having a degree of respect that it has, that has there being a HUGE push to do more and more movie-like experiences, to be able to gain respect.  And people turning to it more and more, who live on it, do expect it to be a fulfillment of lack in their own lives.  And you can take my rant here as partly self-contradictory, and also nail me on hypocrisy if you like, but I was trying to get out what I saw as issues, and maybe missed some.  If I take a step back and look at everything, I then see more and more things, on their own, I don't like.  This impacts me somewhat also because I actually do game design, and need to find ways to try to make a living from doing this.  

I guess what you wrote also can end up also being an issue with the whole backlash against "casual" players.  People who do have other things to do, are attempted to be reached by the videogame industry, and game they liked are both bashed for being "casual" stuff, and also the attempt to appeal to the larger market ends up resulting in content in games being not as appealing to hardcore players.  

So, basically, you think gaming engenders the same types of "dysfunction" that movies, TV, music, and sports do?

Good to know.

Playing through a videogame and telling your own story through doing so can be more powerful and meaningful than a movie story because it's yours and because it's more immersive. The story of dying to the first Goomba. Or when you almost had that headshot lined up. Or your Minecraft castle.

I agree with you that all stories written by a developer to be displayed through dialogue and cutscene are inferior to movies (which have tighter control of the delivery of those elements), but videogame storytelling is not that. Developers who tell a fixed and linear story are just doing it wrong.

Not necessarily. There are plenty of lineair video game stories that beat your average hollywood movie plot any day.
From indie To the moon, to The walking dead, to blockbusters like Heavy rain. It is no where near award winning story writing but I sure was a lot more invested in the characters and story in Heavy rain then in Transformers.

Maybe it's not as good as it used to be with Planescape torment, Grim Fandango, Silent Hill 2, Gabriel Knight, MGS etc. But fixed and lineair stories can still work in video games.

The industry is still young and indeed in many ways flawed - like many other industries were before it.

One could make similar rants about the comic industry or music industry or movie industry or book publishing (which is in shambles in Canada because all the bookstores are now owned by one person (or Wal-f---ing-mart) and there is no profit margin and hence as a writer - you better market your own dang book (unless it's a sure seller). Porn industry. In the end it's all about the almighty buck. And I haven't seen journalistic integraty in a long time. CNN sucks up the the government so hard it's practically government propaganda (or was haven't watched in ages). And Fox... please. All news outlets of all forms prostitute themselves for ratings - or die.

But for the games industry it's undergoing a huge transformation, new giants are forming, old ones are dying and must certainly old business models are being shook to their foundations. The next five years will be interesting.