Entire subcultures, now examined in detail by various Internet personalities, are built around how hard it was to find good media in the "old days", and how eas

Entire subcultures, now examined in detail by various Internet personalities, are built around how hard it was to find good media in the "old days", and how easy it was to end up with crap as your only novel option. See: The Angry Video Game Nerd, various programs on RedLetterMedia, and a few hundred others. It'll be interesting to see what happens to these subcultures now that what they're built on is basically gone, and they're trucking in nostalgia for not just old media but old ways of experiencing media and review availability more than anything else. The percentage of time kids spend, say, playing a truly bad video game because it's the only one they have access to that they haven't already played to death, or re-watching a half-dozen VHS tapes because they're the only kids' movies your family owns so when you don't have a rental out that's it[0], or putting up with some terrible VHS rental from Family Video you grabbed on strength of the cover because damnit that's what you have for the night, has got to be much lower than it used to be. The effects of this on culture, especially things like b-movie culture, will be interesting to observe. Already many kinds of knowledge—film synopses/ratings/trivia, game tips/secrets—have been driven to near-zero social value, which has surely changed kids' society in ways I don't have good insight into (yet—my kids are too young) [0] Kids still do the obsessive watching-the-same-thing-over-and-over thing, but it's different because they never do it because there's no other option anymore. [EDIT] also: > I've got over a hundred unplayed games on Steam, and none of them excite me. LOL, lightweight. I've got like 500 total games (just on Steam) and I've only given maybe half a fair shake, let alone played them all the way through, including many that I played pre-Steam. Those stupid package deals they do and Humble Bundles really add up over the years. I'm kinda slowly bowing out of PC gaming despite knowing there's a ton of excellent stuff on my to-play list, because I'm running up against that having-to-choose-great-things-to-not-experience problem I mentioned in my post upthread. I just don't have enough entertainment hours for it anymore, plus TV, plus catching up on the hundreds of excellent films I haven't seen and the several great ones that come out each year despite the slump, plus OMG so much great TV is coming out now, plus the hundreds of books I want to read, and man there are some comics I'd like to get into but I just can't even with all this other stuff. It's kinda stressful, actually. Like, I can enjoy the very best (or close to) of anything I care to, so I should be. I waste a lot more time on meta-media and reviews and such than I used to, chasing that best-of-the-best sliver of the pie. Meanwhile I grew up with an NES my only console (from early in its lifespan through freshman year of college!) and a few VHS tapes and Saturday Morning Cartoons, a few DVDs later on when I had a job... and I'm not sure my childhood would have actually been any better with this mountain of hyper-available, high-quality entertainment we have today. Worse, maybe. Quite possibly (probably...) my current quality of life would be better without it.