Mass sociogenic illness happens when a group of stressed, socially connected people are exposed to a symptom template that the brain and body can, in a real physiological sense, adopt without any conscious decision to fake anything. The symptoms are genuinely experienced. They are not consciously produced.
No need to be condescending. Stupidity has nothing to do with it, which you might’ve known had you bothered reading some of those words in the article.
PS2/GC/XB was the last generation where, with very few exceptions, the game on the disk was the entire game. No post-launch patches, no DLCs, no microtransactions.
I’m not blinkered enough to say those things are always bad, but it was nice to know you could take a game off a shelf and it’d be the complete product.