Even when the above question is asked, it's often taken as a given that the answer is: "yes," and then the speaker argues not 'if' but 'why.'
On the other hand, "yes" is demonstrably true. Movies, newspapers, magazines, books, television shows – all their material are shorter, louder, simpler, cruder, and, most of all, plainer. From the news using the term "bad guys" instead of "perpetrators," to the removal of the ability to have a character lie sometimes but not others, to the enforced reduction of rather multi-faceted issues to simple dualities of us vs them. And that's just SOME of the stuff you can find in the new production manuals (yes, the manuals exist, I own one) that everyone now has to follow.
However, those new rules are a conscious result of choices made by the money behind the content, and so it is not at all reflective of the broader culture outside of entertainment – a culture which, though it is certainly affected by entertainment, is still largely the same as it has always been.
But back to entertainment. The content that is available now is assembled to a 5th-grade education, most of it. That's no secret – it's the main pitch of the suits behind the content. There are entire books you can read about the philosophy behind that, with 5th grade being their stated desired content level.
Yet, I would argue that this dumbing down is a side-effect of the choices that have been made, instead of, as I usually hear assumed, a purposeful intent on the parts of the suits.
Having watched a lot of old movies in my time, I can honestly tell you that a lot of dumb movies were produced from the beginnings of the industry right up to today. I mean, really, really dumb.
The difference from then unto today is variety, or rather the lack thereof now. In the past, entertainment was pitched in many different genres to many different groups of people. But now, today, that once great diversity has been reduced to only a handful of genres that are pitched to everybody.
Racing, westerns, noir, screwball comedies, invention, adventure, farce, satire, intrigue – that's just some of the movie genres that have been ended in recent years. Just some.
Which has left the industry producing very few genres.
To illustrate with something that is even more stunningly visible, and that doesn't involve going over a hundred years of entertainment - let's take a look at video games. In an industry only thirty years old, the ending of genres is markedly visible. Here is a list of the genres that were once produced:
SIMULATIONS
Military Vehicle (Plane, Tank, Submarine)
Military Fleet
Flight
Space-Jet
Life-Sim
Business
Sport
BOARD GAME-STYLE
Grand Strategy
Empire Builder
4X
Turn-Based Tactical
Turn-Based RPG
Classic Board Games
ACTION
Platformer
Clickies (sometimes called Action RPG)
Real-time Strategy
Real-Time Tactical
Light Gun
Rail Shooter
1x1 Fighting
Beat-M-Up
3rd Person Shooter
COMBAT SIM
Tactical Shooter
Historical Shooter
Sci-Fi Run-n-Gun
PUZZLES
Puzzler
Who-Done-It
(the terribly named) Adventure
Physics-Based
Interactive Fiction
Environmental
PARTY
Rhythm
Trivia
Social
Today, what do you have?
SIMULATIONS
Life-Sim
Business
Sport
BOARD GAME-STYLE
4X (rare)
Classic Board Games
ACTION
Clickies (rare)
Real-time Strategy (rare)
1x1 Fighting (rare)
3rd Person Shooter
COMBAT SIM
Sci-Fi Run-n-Gun (what about Call of Duty, et all? – hah, if you regenerate health and/or have infinite ammo in even one gun, that's Sci-Fi no matter what the setting pretends to be)
PUZZLES
Physics-Based (rare)
PARTY
Rhythm
And added to those, one single new genre:
NETWORKING
MMORPG
So, instead of a dumbing down of the games that are available, what has happened is that most of the "smart" genres have been stripped from development, leaving only the dumb styles of games. You can see it quite clearly in the lists above.
This has been a larger trend across all fields of entertainment. The variety has been greatly reduced, and only the most popular genres are developed for now, with anything "intelligent" long since cut out, along with many other genres. Not suddenly, but one by one, the other genres lost their backing.
It's not a secret, either. It was a conscious, often-told business decision. The proponents of this theory have the idea that it is easier and more cost-effective to do what is most popular, and then include elements that those who like the less popular genres like in order to bring them into liking the more popular style. ie, producing an Action movie with Noir-ish elements in order to attempt to make a movie for action fans that also appeals to Noir fans.
And it was quite a successful theory, too. At first. When only a few companies were doing it.
But in the way of modern business, every businessperson reads the exact same book, and now every single company is following the exact same theory. So, now every games company is making First Person Shooters, because there's big money in selling that genre. Which, when you look at that from a broader perspective, means that every single games company is chasing the money of the FPS fan crowd, but no one's chasing the money of the Grand Strategy crowd.
And THAT has the broader effect of reducing the amount of money available to the indistry, since they have effectively excluded the money of sections of the populace by excluding their genres from development, while at the same time putting every company in competition for the exact same dollars of the FPS fans. The exact same dollars, because FPS fans don't have a limitless supply of money or time, so they're just not going to be able to consume all of the FPS games currently being produced for them. Which means the money from the FPS fans will be dispersed over many games, instead of a few, reducing the profitability of all FPS games, while also guaranteeing that a large number of them will fail.
And thus, too, you have sequel-it-is – a way of trying to bring back the guarantee of big money returns.
Yes, the potential returns on an FPS are larger. But that's POTENTIAL. If you eliminate a number of customers by stopping production of games for them (and you'll only get a small portion of them back with simple gimmicks from their favored genres added to the popular genres), you reduce the overall money entering into the field, and with a smaller pool of money to draw from, the industry has to shrink.
The suits somehow seem to have forgotten the old capitalist idea of trying to milk every dollar you can from every member of the populace you can find, and replaced it with the idea that you should milk only the popular and the easy.
How very High School.
P.S. If I were truly cynical, I might wonder why the only two main genres of games left are Combats Sims and Domestic Sims – as if they were trying to forcibly groom men for life as a soldier and women for life in the home. Hm.
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