Economics of art
Suppose you watch an action movie that has five big action sequences in total. Why didn't it have more? Why wasn't it just two hours of nonstop action? Maybe because the audience would get physically exhausted from being in a heightened state of arousal for that long, and they need a break. Or because the action sequences mean more when they contrast against quieter, reflective scenes.
But at some level it's gotta also be the cost. It's much cheaper to film two people talking in the kitchen than it is to choreograph a five-person fight sequence with two hundred extras and the destruction of a fighter jet. As cool as it might be to more sequences like the latter, you only have so much budget for the film. Scaling up the action will directly eat into profitability without proportionally scaling up revenue, so the financial incentive may actually be to have as few action sequences as possible while still pleasing audiences. So we are denied the action-packed film of our dreams.
I'm intrigued how this and other issues of finances or practicality affect how different media are made.
The same logic applies to time as to money. It's seemingly universal in theater for the tech process to be a frenetic scramble to get everything ready before opening night. Scenes are cut, choreography is simplified, artistic vision is compromised in order to be ready on time.
In an interview, Lucas Pope, the creator of the video game Return of the Obra Dinn, was defending one of the game design choices he made. Except he wasn't defending it. He was saying that actually he regretted that decision, and thought it'd be better if changed, but by the time he realized it was a problem he was completely burnt out and needed to finish working on the game. Here the resource constraint is not time or money, but psychological endurance.
Then there are the fundamental laws of the universe. That prop might be cool, but the energy required to power it would heat up this other prop and make it combust. The audio latency in our sound system is just too high to make this effect work. My sculpture cannot be because there is no material on earth with the right combination of texture, shine, and structural integrity. The snail in my snail marathon would be eaten by a hawk before mile three.
Now it's fun to imagine what could happen as technology continues to advance, and enable entirely new that were either impossible or infeasible in the past. Solid state drives in computers reduced the need for loading times in video games, enabling entirely new forms of scene. The color camera enabled... color. But what else will change? Maybe special effects become so cheap that the two-hour action sequence is in budget; maybe cheap, abundant solar power makes energy-guzzling art installations commonplace; maybe hawks go extinct!
Most fun of all may be to observe a work of art and wonder at why it is the way it is.