Binging Media is Kind of Lame
I’ve been thinking about the rate in which I experience media.
Media is so accessible now and with that accessibility comes unrestrained and probably unhealthy binging. It’s so easy to consume large chunks of media in very dense sittings.
For the purposes of experiencing media, I think binging is kind of lame in some circumstances. This generalizes to games, books, shows, whatever.
One thing that will make me almost guaranteed to enjoy a piece of media and its story more is making the consumption of it a routine.
It becomes a regular part of my life, always there in the background for me to look forward to.
I suppose you could do this with binging, but it’s much harder for something to become a routine if you blast through it in a couple of days. The raw amount of time consuming is the same, but with binging it is much more densely packed. It’s also not really feasible to do for shorter forms of media.
I want to savor the stories that I experience.
It’s too easy for your experience of something to just kind of meld together hazily. With binging you're setting aside time to enter another world, you can become fully immersed in it. You leave the world as fast as you entered it: in a flash.
With more long-term exposures, those worlds seep into yours and form around it, and it becomes much more intimate than if you just binged it.
That to me is a form of immersion that I find much more interesting: the type of media that pulls you towards it even when you’re not actively experiencing it.
With a long-term exposure, you feel the “post-series depression” so much more strongly. You can feel the hole that remains when a regular part of your life is suddenly gone.
Perhaps if we knew the definitive ends of specific aspects of our lives (friendships, relationships, phases of life) as if they were the finale to a closely held show, we would be able to notice out and cherish those moments more. Life is not so succinctly segmented into small sections.
In 2020, I played Persona 5, in 2021, I played Persona 4, and in 2022, I played Persona 3. Over the course of about a month of casual playing, I work my way through these games. They became a constant that I always had and could always go back to. The completion of those games was much more impactful, as I had spent a month working through them and thinking about them.
I think that this is one of the powers of art. Something that is able to add a color to our lives that we have never experienced before, but something so fleeting that we are able to notice the absence of the color and miss it instead of growing indifferent to it.
I don't know how applicable this quote is to this topic but it uses the word verily and that's cool. “But verily, it be the nature of dreams to end.”