If people brought their tv to every event and outing ever I'd have the same criticism

And television isn't tailored to each individual with content engineered to make sure they don't look away for as long as possible

Functionally very different things. Those old games weren't programmed to feed you a never-ending stream of content that's designed to provoke ever more extreme reactions from you to keep you engaged with the feed. Did they provoke extreme reactions? Maybe, but that's more because they needed to be hard enough that you couldn't finish them during a rental period and you had to buy them.

Not the saem

Maybe Real Life™ should just get good?

Man that's what it is. Real life just sucks. So depressing.

I think it actually started, ironically, with the writers strike.