deckardcanine | (no subject)

On Sunday I stayed up late to finish a movie so I could get the next Netflix delivery on Wednesday, which would leave time for another on Saturday. Alas, either Netflix or the USPS has gotten less consistent about this lately, so I'm getting one today.

I felt like griping about the slowness, but then I realized how spoiled that would sound. So what if I get one disc this week instead of two? That'll become the norm if they implement their idea to cut Saturday deliveries. Besides, I still have plenty of streaming videos to watch -- not to mention other suitable ways to pass the time. (As it happens, I didn't even make time for a TV episode yesterday.) There's no need to race, especially when I'm still getting more than my money's worth.

Today I read of an ordinary man striving for a top-10,000 films list. I thought, "What a fool. That's way too long a list to sustain the interest of friends and family, let alone strangers." But then I realized that I could easily have become this man in the future. The goal would serve less as a service to others and more as a means of adding order to my obsession.

Or should I say "addiction"? As I heard in a recent audioconference, addiction is less about what you do and more about what you don't as a result. Are my viewings getting in the way of things that should matter more strongly? I'm not sure, but it couldn't hurt to cut back.

To be fair, watching movies on Sunday with Dad and sometimes Mom is good for family time. It's the rest of the week that sees mere leisure masquerading as self-enrichment.

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"As I heard in a recent audioconference, addiction is less about what you do and more about what you don't as a result."

That's a very good observation. I think this will be what I keep in mind when the subject of video games being addictive or not comes up, and it comes up often enough (I think the first time someone said this to me was when I was in 7th grade, and more recently, MMORPGs get described that way (and, in some cases, I think it fits)).

From what I've read, WoW was specially designed to be addictive whether or not the players had fun. How insidious.

What I don't like about the setup of MMORPGs in general (although I've only played WoW and Runescape, it looks like a common theme) is the keeping up thing: if you want to keep playing with your friends characters, you have to play your characters about as much as they play theirs (there's "powerleveling", in the sense of just doing whatever get you the most experience all the time but that's not usually much fun) and you can expect that there's *someone* happy to spend all their spare time playing, and a few hours a night seems to be the usual minimum. I think this might be the main mechanic for wasting time. I wouldn't say WoW is addictive in the same way as, say, Tetris. I can think of one person that I really would consider to have been throughly addicted, although she was using it as her main social outlet, too, so that may be a lot of it.

I just think that movies and TV eat up time I could be using for something more productive like writing or drawing. Of course, my family gathers around the TV, and it's sort of a social activity...kinda...if you want to be told to be quiet and stop interrupting the program.