right now our economic base favors cheap, digital, easily-available entertainments, which unfortunately are very often isolating and exploitative in their own ways.
Definitely. And because people are almost limited to gaming, gaming companies really put the squeeze on the consumer base and the workers through gambling like mechanics (the absolute worst imho), micro transactions, deleting the second hand market, monopolizing the sales platform (steam). They really will squeeze until the consumer base breaks. And as it stands Xbox and PlayStation next gen consoles are dead on arrival thanks to "AI"