How unfortunate that the artistic community, in all aspects, is being destroyed for corporate greed. And that the artists, who now receive so little for their talents, have succumbed to this 'system'. But even beyond that, our nation's children are becoming zombified by the same corporate greed. Simply horrifying! 😒
Rocka, there are several important observations here that deserve to be taken seriously, but the argument as a whole collapses under its own absolutism and its repeated habit of turning partial truths into total explanations.
You are right that much contemporary entertainment is engineered for retention rather than completion. Variable reward schedules, infinite content pipelines, and algorithmic optimization do, in fact, exploit known psychological vulnerabilities. This is not controversial. Designers, economists, and psychologists have documented it extensively. Nor is it controversial that many people experience fatigue, distraction, and diminished attention as a result. On that much, we agree.
Where the analysis goes off the rails is when you recast these market dynamics as a metaphysical inversion of “God’s design,” and then treat that inversion as though it explains the entire history and present state of art, story, and play. That move replaces discernment with totalizing narrative.
Entertainment has never been purely formative, complete, or ennobling. The ancient world had endless spectacles, formulaic myths, cheap popular songs, and mindless diversions alongside its great epics and tragedies. Medieval Europe had miracle plays and bawdy farces next to Dante. The nineteenth century had penny dreadfuls alongside Dickens. The twentieth century had disposable radio serials alongside Tolkien. Extraction and depth have always coexisted. The difference today is scale and speed, not essence.
Your treatment of completion is also overly romanticized. Many of the most formative artistic experiences in history were serial, open-ended, and revisited over time: oral epics told in cycles, liturgical music repeated weekly for decades, long-running theatrical repertoires, even Scripture itself, which is not a single “complete statement” but a canon read, reread, and lived into over generations. Formation does not require finality in the way you suggest. It requires meaning, truth, and proper ordering of desire.
The claim that endlessness necessarily produces numbness is similarly overstated. Endless consumption can be numbing, yes, but so can shallow completion. Finishing something does not automatically transform anyone. Many people finished mediocre games, films, and albums in the 1990s and were no better for it. Transformation depends on content, context, and the disposition of the person receiving it, not simply on whether a narrative resolves.
Your account of “God’s design” for art and entertainment also lacks theological grounding. Scripture does not present a theory of narrative structure, campaign length, or album format. What it presents is a moral vision: that human creativity should be ordered toward truth, goodness, beauty, and love of neighbor. That vision can be betrayed by infinite loops, but it can just as easily be betrayed by finite works that glorify cruelty, nihilism, or vanity. Limitation is not sanctity. Nor is completion.
The repeated invocation of “Babylon” again functions as a rhetorical shortcut. It gives readers a villain but absolves them of responsibility to make careful distinctions. Algorithms are not demons. Franchises are not cosmic rebellions. They are products of human choices, incentives, and habits, many of which are shared and sustained by the very audiences who claim to be victimized by them. When everything is framed as extraction imposed from above, the harder work of prudence, self-governance, and cultural patience gets displaced by indignation.
There is also an unexamined elitism running through the piece. You implicitly treat certain forms of taste—single-player campaigns, auteur films, album listening, indie studios—as inherently superior, while mass appeal, serialized enjoyment, and casual consumption are framed as evidence of spiritual diminishment. Christianity has never taught that formation belongs only to the refined or the discerning. Ordinary pleasures, even repetitive ones, can be received with gratitude and moderation without becoming instruments of domination.
Your practical exhortation to attend, finish, reflect, and resist compulsive consumption is sound advice. But it does not require the apocalyptic scaffolding you build around it. One can encourage attention, restraint, and intentional engagement without declaring the entire entertainment industry a corpse or treating the present moment as uniquely inverted in salvation history.
The real danger is not that stories no longer end. It is that many people no longer govern their own attention. That problem is moral and spiritual, but it is also personal. It is addressed not by rejecting systems wholesale, but by cultivating virtue: temperance, patience, discipline, and wonder. Those virtues were necessary in every age, including the ones you idealize.
If the goal is restoration, then clarity matters. We do not need a grand conspiracy to explain distraction. We need honest acknowledgment that tools amplify what human beings already struggle with, and that freedom is recovered not by nostalgia or totalizing narratives, but by choosing rightly within the world as it actually exists.
Finish things, yes. Attend deeply, yes. Reject manipulation, yes. But do not confuse a critique of modern incentives with a theology of history. The former can be helpful. The latter, as presented here, obscures more than it reveals.
I’m always blown away by your write-ups and how you always bring the truth to light. Thank you
Excellent article! Thank you.
How unfortunate that the artistic community, in all aspects, is being destroyed for corporate greed. And that the artists, who now receive so little for their talents, have succumbed to this 'system'. But even beyond that, our nation's children are becoming zombified by the same corporate greed. Simply horrifying! 😒
Rocka, there are several important observations here that deserve to be taken seriously, but the argument as a whole collapses under its own absolutism and its repeated habit of turning partial truths into total explanations.
You are right that much contemporary entertainment is engineered for retention rather than completion. Variable reward schedules, infinite content pipelines, and algorithmic optimization do, in fact, exploit known psychological vulnerabilities. This is not controversial. Designers, economists, and psychologists have documented it extensively. Nor is it controversial that many people experience fatigue, distraction, and diminished attention as a result. On that much, we agree.
Where the analysis goes off the rails is when you recast these market dynamics as a metaphysical inversion of “God’s design,” and then treat that inversion as though it explains the entire history and present state of art, story, and play. That move replaces discernment with totalizing narrative.
Entertainment has never been purely formative, complete, or ennobling. The ancient world had endless spectacles, formulaic myths, cheap popular songs, and mindless diversions alongside its great epics and tragedies. Medieval Europe had miracle plays and bawdy farces next to Dante. The nineteenth century had penny dreadfuls alongside Dickens. The twentieth century had disposable radio serials alongside Tolkien. Extraction and depth have always coexisted. The difference today is scale and speed, not essence.
Your treatment of completion is also overly romanticized. Many of the most formative artistic experiences in history were serial, open-ended, and revisited over time: oral epics told in cycles, liturgical music repeated weekly for decades, long-running theatrical repertoires, even Scripture itself, which is not a single “complete statement” but a canon read, reread, and lived into over generations. Formation does not require finality in the way you suggest. It requires meaning, truth, and proper ordering of desire.
The claim that endlessness necessarily produces numbness is similarly overstated. Endless consumption can be numbing, yes, but so can shallow completion. Finishing something does not automatically transform anyone. Many people finished mediocre games, films, and albums in the 1990s and were no better for it. Transformation depends on content, context, and the disposition of the person receiving it, not simply on whether a narrative resolves.
Your account of “God’s design” for art and entertainment also lacks theological grounding. Scripture does not present a theory of narrative structure, campaign length, or album format. What it presents is a moral vision: that human creativity should be ordered toward truth, goodness, beauty, and love of neighbor. That vision can be betrayed by infinite loops, but it can just as easily be betrayed by finite works that glorify cruelty, nihilism, or vanity. Limitation is not sanctity. Nor is completion.
The repeated invocation of “Babylon” again functions as a rhetorical shortcut. It gives readers a villain but absolves them of responsibility to make careful distinctions. Algorithms are not demons. Franchises are not cosmic rebellions. They are products of human choices, incentives, and habits, many of which are shared and sustained by the very audiences who claim to be victimized by them. When everything is framed as extraction imposed from above, the harder work of prudence, self-governance, and cultural patience gets displaced by indignation.
There is also an unexamined elitism running through the piece. You implicitly treat certain forms of taste—single-player campaigns, auteur films, album listening, indie studios—as inherently superior, while mass appeal, serialized enjoyment, and casual consumption are framed as evidence of spiritual diminishment. Christianity has never taught that formation belongs only to the refined or the discerning. Ordinary pleasures, even repetitive ones, can be received with gratitude and moderation without becoming instruments of domination.
Your practical exhortation to attend, finish, reflect, and resist compulsive consumption is sound advice. But it does not require the apocalyptic scaffolding you build around it. One can encourage attention, restraint, and intentional engagement without declaring the entire entertainment industry a corpse or treating the present moment as uniquely inverted in salvation history.
The real danger is not that stories no longer end. It is that many people no longer govern their own attention. That problem is moral and spiritual, but it is also personal. It is addressed not by rejecting systems wholesale, but by cultivating virtue: temperance, patience, discipline, and wonder. Those virtues were necessary in every age, including the ones you idealize.
If the goal is restoration, then clarity matters. We do not need a grand conspiracy to explain distraction. We need honest acknowledgment that tools amplify what human beings already struggle with, and that freedom is recovered not by nostalgia or totalizing narratives, but by choosing rightly within the world as it actually exists.
Finish things, yes. Attend deeply, yes. Reject manipulation, yes. But do not confuse a critique of modern incentives with a theology of history. The former can be helpful. The latter, as presented here, obscures more than it reveals.
Elden ring. That’s a game of completion!!
Yeah, Elden Ring is an actual game, a finished experience with no extraction mechanics.