Ask Paul: July 25 (Premium)

Happy Friday! This week's Ask Paul is a contender for the longest of all time, so let's kick off the weekend a bit early and get this started.
? A new battlefield
spacecamel asks:

Did you see the new Battlefield 6 trailer? Any chance that you switch from COD? I am hopeful it gives COD some real competition.

This has a real "here we go again" vibe to it. But this trailer also brought up an uncomfortable reminder of an ongoing worry.

So ... yeah. I'm always open to whatever when it comes to how I spend my time, and with Call of Duty in particular, I would be happy to find something else to play that was somehow as engaging (by which I probably mean "addicting"). And Battlefield is clearly in the same wheelhouse, so to speak, and always has been, alongside other on-again/off-again series like Medal of Honor, Rainbow Six/Ghost Recon, and so on.

The Battlefield 6 trailer is technically and visually impressive, of course. It does feel a bit like a game engine demo in that there are repeated and similar scenes of helicopters crashing through buildings, various structures collapsing, and so on. And it has the visceral, movie-like world-building set up you expect from a big budget, action-oriented entertainment product. There are also moments reminiscent of other games, like the battle royale-style wing-suited soldiers flying through the air.

But it's also just a single player reveal, and I pretty much focus on multiplayer these days. (There will be a multiplayer reveal on July 31, so I am looking forward to that.)

Battlefield rarely aligned with me as well as Call of Duty for some reason. This probably varied over time, but the Battlefield games tended to focus on larger, open space maps with more participants than was the case with COD, though the latter expanded over time to include more map and play types. And added its own battle royale game, separately, in Warzone. So COD has clearly been influenced by other popular games.

But this trailer also reminded me of an issue I struggle with pretty regularly, which I guess boils down to an inability to focus and handle longer-form content of whatever kinds. I usually think about this issue in terms of reading, where, even as a lifelong reader and someone who reads throughout the day, every day, I struggle with longer-form books and articles. It's like the Internet has killed this ability. Worse, it's killed the desire to even try. I bet many people are like that these days, it's why an AI summary is suddenly so compelling. We don't even have the attention span for a YouTube Short.

As the successor to the original Medal of Honor--it was made by many of the same people--COD started out as a mostly single player experience as it was trying to replicate the experience of fighting in World War II. I played that game originally on the PC, and it wasn't until the Xbox 360 arrived, with Call of Duty 2 as one of the launch titles, that I switched exclusively to the console. And in the...