I've recently gotten hooked on an open-world game called Where Winds Meet. Before that, I played Genshin Impact and watched friends play Zelda. All three share the same underlying logic: explore the map, take on quests, level up, collect things. Turn off the visuals and leave only the mechanics, and you'd struggle to tell them apart. But I don't like Genshin or Zelda—only Where Winds Meet, for a simple reason: it's a martial-arts open world. I'm not just "playing a game." I'm living through a period of history being brought back to life.
Adorno and Horkheimer would probably call this self-deception. Their core argument in The Culture Industry is that cultural products appear to offer diversity, but everything has been standardized. Different car brands look distinct on the surface, yet underneath they're the same—consumers are drawn in by minor differences, convinced they're making a choice. By that logic, the difference between Where Winds Meet and Genshin is equally illusory. The martial-arts aesthetic is just a shell calibrated to my preferences, while the underlying game loop and emotional rhythm are stamped from the same mold.
I'll admit the formula is real. Open-world games have reached a point where there's not much room for mechanical innovation. But Adorno's move of equating "standardized form" with "meaningless content" jumps too far. The way this game recreates the daily life, architecture, and customs of the Song-Liao period isn't a skin you can swap out at will. My experience is closer to an immersive historical documentary—I play as someone living in that era, experiencing it in first person, not the god's-eye view of a history book or the drive-by sightseeing of visiting an old town. That experience is built from form and content together; take away either side and it falls apart.
Ross, in The Naysayers, describes the rift between Benjamin and Adorno: Benjamin believed mechanical reproduction freed art from its ritual bondage, allowing the masses to have genuine experiences through industrialized forms; Adorno saw this as a betrayal of art. I can see through these games' formulas clearly enough—sometimes seeing through them even makes me bored. But seeing through the formula and denying its value are not the same thing.
Adorno's premise is that experiences produced by the culture industry are manipulated, and only unprocessed experiences count as real. But can that line actually be drawn? History itself is narrated, selected—history written by the victors is its own kind of beautification. If we accept that written history is processed, on what grounds do we insist that a game's representation of history is "deception"? Forms change, but cultural transmission hasn't stopped. Someone who has never cracked open a Song dynasty history book starts developing an interest in that era because of a game—is that being co-opted by the culture industry, or is it culture finding its own way forward?