More responsive to your whims, however violent or weird or quotidian. More graphically and sonically immersive, like Destiny, which has its own self-contained economies and lifeforms and weather patterns. The steady advance of technology allows games to be more. And increasingly, the battle for the individual’s attention span penetrates into spaces that were once ostensibly escapes.

The Internet has given rise to a vast and growing shared culture that is simultaneously wearying to follow and painful to detach from. It gets so I can’t enjoy the thing I’m reading or watching or listening to, so haunted am I by the seemingly infinite amount of other things I could potentially be reading, watching, or listening to. Never in human history has it been so easy to be distracted. All of it exists in an immense simulated world filled with digital people and wildlife, missions, side missions, side side missions, and Easter eggs, encompassing 49 square miles of urban cityscape, sylvan woodland, river delta, mountains, deserts, and beaches. Those invitations could be from actual flesh-and-blood human beings or fully virtual, in-game characters. He is/I am constantly receiving texts with invitations to criminal escapades, great and small. My Grand Theft Auto V character has a smartphone.

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