Keima and Modern Entertainment Overload
Last night, I finished The World God Only Knows, for whatever reason. I suppose I wanted to finish what I had started. However, I’m glad I did, because it sparked this thought in my head. In the last episode, Keima laments all the time he has spent trying to capture real girls hearts. It’s kept him from completing all those lovely dating games. Now, he’s fallen too far behind to ever catch up, so he comes to the only obvious solution. He must complete multiple games at the same time! As you would expect, the anime takes it up to insane levels where he eventually collapses and/or hallucinates from exhaustion. We could just write it off as filler because they lacked enough time for a proper arc. However, it actually points out a struggle some of us might have: entertainment overload.
Keima, you are such a god modder!
Well, let’s face it, in this technological age people can create content at a pace that far outstrips any single person’s ability to consume. Youtube estimates 24 hours of video get uploaded every single minute. A brief conversion will give you four years of content uploaded over the span of a day. I have a feeling their reported number might be blown up a bit, and obviously there’s a lot of duplicate material. Even scaled back, it’s insane.
Perhaps more relevant to our interests, right now we’ve got 21 new anime series airing, and this isn’t even the busiest season. Altogether, it generates 8 hours and 24 minutes of material to watch every week. The number doesn’t include series that carried over, such as Index or Bakuman. Nor does it include any other viewable content, such as OVAs or movies. Forget about trying to figure manga and light novels. Obviously, I don’t expect anyone would want to watch every series, every week, all the way through the season. In all likelihood, you’ll only watch a small fraction. In my case, I’m juggling 6 series.
That doesn’t sound like a lot, and of course, it really isn’t. There’s so much else you or I probably want to do though. For one, we’ve got these things called backlogs, anime we want to watch but haven’t quite found the time to do it. Right now, my list is populated with 424 episodes, not including the incredibly long Keroro Gunso or Gintama which I’ve barely started. I also like video games, and I have the misfortune of enjoying RPGs the most. I think my backlog there is about 20 games deep. There’s also books, American television, blogging, and so forth.
Of course, there’s other things that must be done, such as sleeping, working, schooling, and maintaining a social life. All of these are far more important than anything I’ve listed up until now. I’m also realistic. There is no way in hell I will ever catch up with everything in my backlog. Still, I have a desire to at least try to chip away at it. So what’s a guy to do?
Come on man! Get it together!
Well, I’m typing this while watching television, if that’s any indication. Last night, while I was watching TWGOK, I was playing Phantom Brave. Probably later tonight, I’ll try and knock out a good bit of School Rumble while I play something. Tactical games really are good for this sort of thing. So yes, I’m multitasking, and this isn’t a unique experience. Most of the people I know are working on at least two things at the same time. This isn’t to the comical extent of Keima, but it’s multitasking nonetheless.
It’s kind of funny that Keima points something else out about his games. They used to be savored. You got drawn into a game and really immersed yourself in the story or the gameplay. Naturally, he tosses the idea aside immediately. However, there are still things that receive my undivided attention. When Gosick is on, the mystery is all that’s running through my head. Katanagatari had scads of dialogue you couldn’t ignore, not that you’d want to if you were a fan of its storytelling. Nor can I divert my attention away from a good round of Team Fortress 2, unless I really wanted to die. This is entertainment I want to fully enjoy. You could probably make an argument that anything I don’t give my full attention to doesn’t need to be watched, played, read, or whatever. You’d probably be right too.
I suppose I’ll cap this post off by opening the floor to you. Do you feel at all overwhelmed by the amount of entertainment? If so, what do you do? Do you try to do multiple things at once, or do you still try to savor every experience?
