Yet as blockbuster films began to become exercises in specific types of size and tone, video games followed suit in their own way, offering an increasing number of tangents within games that replicated the multiple plotlines and feeling of space and size found on the big screen. For instance, a movie’s pacing is out of the hands of the viewer, so video games couldn’t borrow anything like editing or special effects from cinematic blockbusters, but they could import the sense of leaving the viewer overstuffed. In blockbuster movies, you get tons of characters; in blockbuster games, you get tons of things for your character to do.

Blockbusters are all about size, which in film equates to visual scale and in games is often represented as “options.” A movie wants to overwhelm you with images, but a game wants to overwhelm you with activity: open-world environments, customizable avatars, side quests, collectibles, achievements, mini-games, and so on. Anything to keep you busy. You can spend as much time as you want playing checkers in Assassin’s Creed or casino games in Mass Effect 3. You can pass actual real-world days of your life just golfing or watching fake television shows in Grand Theft Auto V. You can ride your horse from one end of Red Dead Redemption to the other, doing nothing but shooting birds and collecting flowers and saving the same town again and again from a gang of thieves who never seem to get the message. You can, in other words, avoid plot and consequence as long as you’d like and just play around with the window dressing, which is the same state of self-pleasing distraction that filmmakers want you to enter when you watch a robot that turns into a truck ride another robot that turns into a dinosaur.

The simulated “bigness” that takes root in the mind of the person playing the game is only one part of the picture, though. As the cineplex’s blockbusters start to run together narratively—often seeming to assemble stories and plots from pre-fabricated pieces, right down to the effects—so too do the games that fight for our time and attention start to feel interchangeable. Smart plotting so often feels like an afterthought in blockbuster movies because the films are constructed around major set pieces or fight scenes. It’s not that blockbuster movies can’t be well-written; rather, it’s that the writing is often at odds with the regularly meted out action scenes that got people into the theater in the first place.

Video games have wound up following a similar path: Smart humor, self-aware dialogue, and deep characterization abound, but all those things exist alongside button-mashing fights and quests for MacGuffins. They can whip from smart to dumb and back again so fast it can feel dizzying. Just as a big movie can bounce you from a great scene to a bumpy one, so too can games send you rocketing from a compelling confrontation to dry bits of exposition. Blockbuster gaming even takes movie dialogue problems to an extreme the movies themselves can never match by having the game’s supporting, non-playable characters repeat the same odd blurbs to the player over and over: Play Skyrim long enough, and you won’t be able to go 10 minutes without hearing a sidekick complain again about “[taking] an arrow to the knee.” As a result, games can start to feel pasted together from a lot of little scenes that don’t necessarily connect or make sense together.

Bethesda

There’s something more insidious about the trend, though. Blockbuster movies have any number of quirks, but one of the weirdest is that their size (aesthetically and culturally) can make them feel like pop-culture obligations. Avatar is the highest-grossing film of all time in the U.S., but most people would be hard-pressed to find someone who claimed it as their favorite film. Seeing it was just one of those experiences everyone wanted to have for a few weird weeks in 2009. It was lush and impressive, but also formulaic and a little laughable. It wasn’t that good, but it was big. That’s the greatest trick blockbusters ever pulled: convincing the world that they were fun and entertaining simply by virtue of being big and looking fun and entertaining.