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Tales of an Aging Gamer: Why Don’t I Pick up a Controller as Often as I Used to?

posted by martyb on Monday January 07 2019, @07:43PM   
from the Figured-it-out dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

ArsTechnica:

Gaming was like breathing. It was the biggest part of my life as a teenager, one of my priorities as a college student, and eventually one of my most expensive “hobbies” as a young professional.

Then all of a sudden, after thousands of hours spent playing across genres and platforms, boredom hit me hard for the very first time in my early thirties. Some of my favorite games soon gave me the impression of being terribly long. I couldn’t help but notice all the repeating tropes and similarities in game design between franchises.

I figured it was just a matter of time before I found the right game to stimulate my interest again, but time continued to go by and nothing changed.

Is it that games have failed to innovate, or that real life is ultimately more engaging?

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Original Submission

• Keep looking Keep looking (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @07:48PM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @07:48PM (#783325)

  I can't speak for lack of time/money, but when I do have free time to play I end up playing games that are way different than I used to in my teens/20s. I used to play lots of action, MMO, hack n slash, FPS, racing, RTs, etc but none of that really interests me anymore. Lately I've played things like KSP, Spaceflight simulator, Rovercraft, good ol' solitaire, minesweeper, and text based games.

  Keep looking, you might find something. The best advice I can give is open up to new game genres, things you didn't used to play. You might find something you like, if even for a short time.

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• Re:Keep looking (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday January 08 2019, @08:48PM

  by hendrikboom (1125) on Tuesday January 08 2019, @08:48PM (#783844) Homepage Journal

  I still play solitaire -- specifically, Seahaven Towers. Sometimes just called Seahaven.

  And Sudoku. That's really not an old game yet. I get one a day in my newspaper, and in the online edition it times me. It's really hard getting a good time despite interruptions, having to listen to my wife about something important, etc. The timer doesn't stop, but I have to.

  Hyperrogue gold is a new game, in which you wander a world. But the word isn't flat. It isn't round either. It's curved in the opposite way. It's a hyperbolic plane. After playing it off and on for a few days you start to feel weirds about imagining real-world travel.

  And there's a lovely and delicate little formal puzzle game called Cityglitch. Some of those puzzles are hard.

  -- hendrik

  Parent