Game Over: How Video Games and TV Swapped Souls

Remember when beating Super Mario Bros. meant saving the princess and seeing “The End” flash across the screen? Or when The X-Files left you dangling with a “To Be Continued” that might never resolve? Once upon a time, video games were tidy little quests with a bow on top, while TV shows were sprawling, open-ended cash cows. Today, that script has flipped. Video games are endless digital playgrounds, while TV’s prestige dramas deliver cinematic closure. What happened? The two mediums have traded their souls, reshaped by technology, economics, and our shifting appetites.

In the old days, video games were concise by necessity. Arcade cabinets like Pac-Man or early console classics like The Legend of Zelda demanded a clear beginning, middle, and end. Limited hardware couldn’t sustain infinite sprawl, and the business model—pay-per-play or a one-time cartridge purchase—rewarded tight, satisfying loops. Players chased victory, not eternity. Meanwhile, broadcast television thrived on the opposite impulse. Shows like Dallas or Law & Order stretched across seasons, dangling cliffhangers and recycling formulas to keep eyes glued for ad breaks. Cancellation was the only real finale, and even then, it rarely felt intentional. Games sold closure; TV sold suspense.

Then came the switch. Streaming platforms like Netflix untethered television from the ad-driven hamster wheel. Shows like True Detective —a slow-burn miracle—or Breaking Bad could be sculpted as cohesive, finite sagas, essentially long-form movies. Subscription revenue freed writers to prioritize resolution over perpetual teasing, and binge-watching culture demanded it. Why hook viewers for next week when they’ll devour the whole season by midnight? On the flip side, video games caught the live-service bug. Online connectivity and freemium models turned titles like Fortnite, Destiny, and Overwatch into infinite treadmills. Microtransactions, battle passes, and loot boxes—raking in a cool $67 billion globally in 2022 alone—replaced “The End” with “Just One More Purchase.” Why wrap up a story when you can sell another skin?

The fallout is as artistic as it is economic. Television’s new obsession with tight, auteur-driven arcs has birthed masterpieces. The Sopranos and Chernobyl don’t just entertain—they haunt, their endings etched like novelistic full stops. But this polish comes at a cost: modern TV rarely meanders or experiments like its broadcast ancestors could. It’s too crafted, too afraid to leave loose ends. Video games, meanwhile, revel in their open-endedness. The freedom of Skyrim or Minecraft is intoxicating—player agency unbound—but closure? Good luck. World of Warcraft players don’t “win”; they grind. Red Dead Redemption 2 offers a gut-punch finale, yet its sibling GTA Online spins on forever, a casino with no exit. The story’s less a journey, more a subscription.

This role reversal isn’t just a quirk of entertainment—it’s a mirror of our times. TV has become the novel we savor, a crafted escape with a beginning and end. Video games are the social media feeds we can’t quit, endless scrolls of dopamine hits. One offers catharsis, the other addiction. Which is better? That’s the wrong question. The real one is: What do we want from our stories—closure or infinity? In a world of streaming binges and digital slot machines, we’re still figuring out the answer.