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by DWe1 1027 days ago
I have noticed this and built a system of scarcity in my consumption. I have a "random walk" of movies where I randomly go from one movie to the next based on director, writer, cast, prizes etc. I make sure the walk is not a slog and there is enough good movies that I encounter. That way it's really fun to "hit" a very good movie. It's almost like gambling but then with media consumption. I do that with restaurants/activities too (to a certain extent that I control) with all kinds of subsystems in it that I designed to be fun for myself.

For video games my system is not random, but I will go 20 years in the past and play the major releases of that year. So I'm playing Beyond Good & Evil soon and already look forward to Half Life 2 next year. Makes me hyped but without fail because I know the actual release was a hit.

2 comments

You could apply your video game system to other media consumption as well. Why don't you?
If I had to take a guess: watching a potentially bad movie still has a quality floor unless we are counting those dollar bin Wal mart DVDs. And even a really bad movie is generally 2 hours.

a bad game can be frustrating to play and take 5 times that length at minimum.

All systems went through changes and I'm not afraid to change them further along the way. I was interested in video games from a young age and have an interest in how games progressed over the years. I saw a chance to have a somewhat comprehensive experience from the 90's over to the 00's, who knows how long I will keep doing this.

With movies I didn't want to start in the 30's and watch all kinds of esoteric material that is mostly historically relevant, I just want to be entertained with a movie. Also, with movies it feels more satisfying to watch a classic in between other movies, instead of watching only classic after classic, so that's how I designed that system. With video games, I want all experiences to be very good otherwise I will just stop playing. It's just how I consume it and it's quite personal.

Typically randomness adds an exciting factor to the equation so I prefer it over deterministic systems, but video games are an exception here.

Well they just explained that they created kind of a content consumption subsystem and that having that system is fun in and of itself.

Besides, with something like media consumption, having an idiosyncratic system doesn't to my mind present any conceptual issue where it's necessary to interrogate it for consistency, so I'm a bit confused as to what motivates that kind of question.

this is interesting and sounds like fun. is there anywhere in particular you’re looking for the top releases for 20 years ago?