I play a lot of video games, but I get my recommendations from them very organically. My job requires that I keep up with the newest releases, and if I have any blind spots in my backlog or miss smaller launches, someone at TheGamer is always there to shove said game right in front of my face. It’s how I found 1000xResist last year. But it’s not as easy with other things.
My New Year’s resolution is to read more in 2025, and I already watch a lot of movies. There are some people at the site I talk to about films and get recommendations from (and give to), while I know we also have some avid readers. But no one quite has their eye on things as much as we do for gaming, because we’re all paid to know about gaming. So I turn to lists made by strangers. And, strangers, your lists are bad.
These Lists Are Too Dang Big
I don’t mean I disagree with them. What a day that would be if a list made enough sense that I could disagree with it! These are less lists than they are incomprehensible art experiments. What I want is a collection of similar things grouped by a specific similarity. You know, a list. For example, at TheGamer we have Best Indie Games To Play If You Love Animals. This is very clear – there’s the hook, the justification, and the list. It gives you what you’re looking for.
Over on Letterboxd, mine and everyone’s movie app of choice, all the lists are user-created, and sorted by popularity. This can be changed to most (or least) recent, but that hardly helps. In fairness, Letterboxd does suggest movies that are similar to any given film, and these are usually quite accurate. But if you want something more curated, you’re out of luck.
I recently watched The Last Stop in Yuma County, ironically enough on a recommendation from a fellow TheGamer (shout out to James Kennedy). It’s a relatively small movie, and yet it appears in 11 thousand lists. Amongst these are Things That Piqued My Interest, which is what a Watchlist is for, and which has 35 thousand entries. I think my Watchlist is already a little big, and it has just 842 movies on it.
Also muddying the waters are Letterboxd Backdrops (34k entries), Film Poster Deja Vu (Part 3!) [exclamation point theirs, but also mine because why make a three part list?] (1.9k entries), All Movies (30k entries), and 10,000 Films At 90 Minutes-Ish Or Less, which as you guessed it, contains 10,000 films.
This is much worse for popular films. Challengers, my movie of the year, occupies 303 thousand lists, including such digital pollution as All The Movies Sorted By Posters (separate to All Movies and with an extra seven thousand to take it to 37k), Who Designed This Poster (which provides no answers to the question it asks and features 5.7k films), and The Ultimate I Can’t Pick A Movie List, of which there are several and a function that again is reliably filled by a Watchlist, not a random assortment of junk clocking in at 8.7k.
Are These Supposed To Be Helpful?
But the worst part is that, especially for movies with a little more traction like Challengers, there are some lists that fulfill what I always assumed was the core purpose of a list – grouping things together by a specific trope so that people looking for more of the same can find it. For example, Challengers appears on Obsession In Movies, which offers an attainable 104 films to peruse, as well as Films With Actually Bisexual Characters (341 entries), and Brat Summer (414 entries, on the upper end of useful but having seen 308 without trying, these are all pretty accessible movies). My favourite though is Thought Daughter, an extension of the Thot Daughter meme to mean women who overthink everything, which has just 48 entries. Even from the unlikely starting point of just Challengers, you could easily work your way through the entire list with only the vaguest amount of effort.
I realise the purpose of lists is not necessarily to complete them – this was a bone of contention with End of Evangelion was removed from Letterboxd’s Top 250 and the Animation 100. But these lists have no purpose. Every movie with a poster? Why does anyone care about that?
I’ve recently moved back to Goodreads to help keep my reading resolution in check, and have noticed the same issue there. If we go to Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow – AKA the gamer book – we initially see some well meaning lists of Best Books Of The 2020s and Best Books Of 2022, both of which feel unwieldy at 2,470 and 1,521 entries respectively. Then there’s Best Books Ever, offering an entirely uncurated list of 126,977 books – the first of which is The Hunger Games. I like it, but come on now.
It’s also on several lists for women born in the 1970s and 1990s, though none in the 1980s on the first page, which just feels strange. Then it features on READ IT OVER AND OVER AGAIN! [caps and exclamation mark theirs and definitely not mine], which contains 10,282 books. Far more than the average person could even read once in a lifetime.
It doesn’t feel like there’s any point to any of this, and I speak of both the lists themselves and me complaining about it. It’s just another sign of the increasingly isolated individualism of the internet. These lists aren’t made for others to participate in or use, but to look at. To admire. Maintaining these lists of every book with blue on the cover becomes part of your identity. And, all the same, complaining about everything has become part of mine.
Related
TheGamer Staff’s Most Anticipated Games Coming In 2025
Here’s all the games that TG’s staff is most looking forward to playing.