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I respect Matt a lot for his continued valuable insight on the streaming universe, but I think he goes into the wrong direction here (probably some confirmation

I respect Matt a lot for his continued valuable insight on the streaming universe, but I think he goes into the wrong direction here (probably some confirmation bias involved). > Most media categories are confined by three challenges. First is their finite length. At a certain point, you reach the last page of a book, last episode of a TV show, or end of a podcast. This is a feature, not a bug. With the massive, coordinated attack of the attention economy on everyone's focus, I predict a new wave of burned victims who voluntarily eject from "hedonistic treadmill" type games where you play all day long and never reach the end in order to go back to completing wholesome experiences. There's a whole generation to still discover what an end game screen looks like, but once they've seen a great and hard earned one, it's hard to go back on that satisfaction.

Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
A game can have no ending because it's an endless grinding treadmill (like most pay-to-win mobile games and their most satanic incarnation, gacha games, where they endlessly introduce new characters to milk the player base for money) or it can have no ending because it's a sandbox where you can make your own story, like TES Daggerfall or Ultima Online (Daggerfall did have a main quest with endings but many players choose to just live their life, buy houses, become the leader of factions and so on). Then there are also games that do have a restricted length but they generate very different stories so they have almost endless replayability, like Civilization games or (if I may digress a bit into a totally different thing) AI Dungeon 2. In the former kind of games, indeed infinite length is not an advantage, but I think in the latter two kinds, it is.