Levels of perception and the lowest common denominator

Look at me making a big boy post with a half-formed opinion I managed to form in my ass!

I watched the latest episode of Extra Credits with my housemate/collaborator (please watch first!) and it makes a point of decrying the stylistic conventions of Max Payne 3; namely, its saturation of bullet-time effects, gore, nudity, drugs and alcohol, and particularly the crushingly nihilistic worldview of the titular character. He posits that the ramping up of these qualities in contrast to the earlier entries in the series shows an attempt to pander to a certain adolescent market, or at least mindset, by presenting them with a more 'mature' narrative which he ultimately denounces as shallow.

I particularly loved Max Payne 3, not in spite of these qualities, but because of them. I took them as pure satire, eating up every line of Max's absurdly depressing dialogue with deep belly laughter. Certain nuances of the game, like Max's inflection and the fact that he literally dresses up like Die Hard in the second half, made me think that the writers were fairly aware of what they were doing.

Gino disagrees, to an extent; while he agrees that the writers probably had a pretty good handle on the fact that they were basically writing a comedy, he puts to me that the game's marketing campaign presented what the people responsible thought was a hard-edged, gritty, 'badass' power fantasy. The game was pretty gritty and I definitely felt pretty AMERICAN! as I gunned down faceless droves of Brazilian people in slo-mo (fuck soccer!). But that didn't detract from the layer of satire for me.

The first sentence of this post embodies what is basically my argument. I realize that for all my big words and intellectual discourse, I am basically shitting out an opinion many people have discussed at length long before I got to it, and just posing my thoughts for the fuck of it. I tend to view things in two layers-- the basic elements presented, and the intent of the creator. You can argue for days about what a particular piece of media 'means', but for a lot of things (particularly video games) these two layers can be lumped pretty easily. I, in fact, tend to default to what I think was the creator's intent with any media I consume, leading me to often being at odds with my friend for not realizing why Deadly Premonition is fucking amazing, and more than a buggy, badly voice-acted disaster.

My housemate Gino's assertion is that the majority of the people don't even attempt to do this. Apparently most people exist only on the base level with their perception of content, making Max Payne's target audience look roughly like this:

This is a concept which I have trouble with, but is already proven; the lowest common denominator. Call of Duty's fanbase proves that most of the people-- or at least a very vocal minority-- who enjoy and fund my hobbies are a bunch of retards. Is this real life? Do most people really pick up a copy of Bulletstorm and see a totally fucking badass, violent shooter for for-real grown-ups like them?

That's a depressing thought. At this rate my life will resemble the opening of Max Payne 3 by the time I'm 30.