There are more books, movies, video games, music, entertainment in general than I could ever consume in a lifetime. And I don't just mean the sum total, including the all the crap; I mean, stuff I would like, even love.
While this doesn't stop me from picking up new stuff occasionally, I have used this fact to crowbar myself off the content treadmill. Why look forward to the movie coming out in six months when my movie backlog is already as tall as I am? Why play these addiction-based mobile games when I've got enough mobile games that don't do that?
Granted, in the case of mobile games, one is really reduced to filtering through the pile to find one that doesn't work this way, but on a moment-by-moment basis, you don't need a thousand good choices... you just need the one. My phone isn't loaded down with games, but the Slay the Spire that is on it, has zero microtransactions, and basically has the same gacha mechanics embedded into it even if you need that sort of thing, is pretty sufficient for most times I've been reaching for my phone lately.
There is a local arcade I've been to a few times, but it's a price to buy in and everything inside is free play after that, so you don't have to worry about the arcade mechanics draining your wallet either.
> There are more books, movies, video games, music, entertainment in general than I could ever consume in a lifetime. And I don't just mean the sum total, including the all the crap; I mean, stuff I would like, even love.
This is why doom & gloom reactions about anything that might slow media publishing don't make any sense to me. I'd have to be insanely dedicated to make it through the backlog of very-likely-to-be-good stuff I want to experience for basically any medium, just of what's already been published/recorded/whatever. Like, tens-of-hours-per-week dedicated, for decades, just to make a single pass over all of it. "We can't reform copyright, what if novels stop being written and movies stop being made!" Well... it'd harm my quality of life basically not at all, so, that just doesn't seem like a huge problem to me (putting aside that a huge amount of writing is free anyway, and has a large audience—see: fan fiction).
Maybe I'd finally get through my list of pre-WWII films I want to watch, at least, before kicking the bucket. Catch up on the titles from the first few thousand years of the written word that are still on my to-read list. Big deal if very little more is published, it'd be impossible to run out of great material as it is.
It's even true for the young medium of video games! I'm still likely gonna have probably-good games on my to-play pile that were already published by today in 2023 if I live until 2070, even if zero more games are published starting this second. "What if this reform means less stuff gets published?" God, I just do not care. Hell, if a reform stops most new publishing but makes older stuff cheaper and more widely available, it might be a win for me, overall. Running out of content to "consume" is a complete non-issue regardless of what happens to those industries in the future. There are several lifetimes worth of good-to-great content already.
There are more books, movies, video games, music, entertainment in general than I could ever consume in a lifetime. And I don't just mean the sum total, including the all the crap; I mean, stuff I would like, even love.
While this doesn't stop me from picking up new stuff occasionally, I have used this fact to crowbar myself off the content treadmill. Why look forward to the movie coming out in six months when my movie backlog is already as tall as I am? Why play these addiction-based mobile games when I've got enough mobile games that don't do that?
Granted, in the case of mobile games, one is really reduced to filtering through the pile to find one that doesn't work this way, but on a moment-by-moment basis, you don't need a thousand good choices... you just need the one. My phone isn't loaded down with games, but the Slay the Spire that is on it, has zero microtransactions, and basically has the same gacha mechanics embedded into it even if you need that sort of thing, is pretty sufficient for most times I've been reaching for my phone lately.
There is a local arcade I've been to a few times, but it's a price to buy in and everything inside is free play after that, so you don't have to worry about the arcade mechanics draining your wallet either.