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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?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @08:31PM (3 children)
It's called growing up, and it's not as bad as youngsters would like you to think.
It happens at a different age with different people. I played my last video game when I was 17. That was 40 years ago.
Computers are still a big part of my life (my entire carreer was built around them), but what I do with them today is completely different than in my teenage years. And, you know, my everyday life and hobbies have expanded since then. Marriage, kids, travel, etc. With the kids basically adults now, I started on other projects: thruhiking the appalachian trail, building my retirement cottage for my wife and I with my own two hands, etc.
The world is vast and varried. And the more you discover, the more things you do, the less and less spendings hours sitting on your ass in front of a screen seems like an interesting way of spending your time.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by EJ on Monday January 07 2019, @08:35PM
Nope. That's not it at all. It's just how the brain works. Boredom is a real thing that has nothing to do with the actual activity or the "age-appropriateness" of it.
Just look at chess. Chess is just as much a game as Super Mortal Smash Kombat Party 12, yet we see many geriatrics playing chess without thinking they should "grow up" and stop.
Some people can go surfing every single day of their life without ever getting tired of it. Others are constantly looking for something new and different to do.
Everything can get boring after awhile.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 08 2019, @12:29AM
Yours is a good perspective, but "The world is vast and varried. And the more you discover, the more things you do, the less and less spendings hours sitting on your ass in front of a screen seems like an interesting way of spending your time" is not quite as true as you would think.
If you have TONS of disposable income then yes, traveling the world and doing things IRL is quite entertaining. Without tons of cash your options are VERY quickly limited, traveling the world gets boring as well once you realize humans are pretty much the same everywhere, and group activities are usually a bit infrequent once you're out of school.
Local and cheap hobbies will work for some people, but not everyone has the resources to do so. Don't judge how other people spend their own time, in the end we all turn to dust and even the most grand human works break down over time.
I would say the bigger problem is a lack of public space and transportation. It simply costs too much and takes too long to go do things more than a mile from home, perhaps as we get older we get enough resources to expand our interests but I still see nothing wrong with gaming as long as it isn't causing the person unhappiness or other life problems.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday January 08 2019, @02:47PM
My taste in games has changed dramatically as I grew up.
For many years we had no computer or computer games in the house. Most of my exposure to such games was at friends' houses instead. There was the usual assortment of family board games in the house, but I was mainly focused on construction toys and the like. At some point a Game Boy came into the household, and later my brother and I bought a friend's SNES so we could play through that Zelda game we'd started when visiting our cousins abroad. Come high school we had a PC in the house (later several more) and my teenage years were dominated by building and upgrading PCs, and carting them to friends' houses for network gaming sessions. I kept buying second-hand consoles to play subsequent Zelda titles, but PC gaming was my focus. I got introduced to tabletop roleplaying games. There was a brief stint of online gaming too with star wars flight sims, but dial-up internet and league competitions that were geared to the USA/night owls put paid to that.
At university, I got into table-top wargaming of various flavours, and having lost my old network(!) of PC gamers, found myself playing a lot of same-room multiplayer console games in house-shares, usually Mario Kart. When I moved out and got married, the focus moved to new board games (Catan et.al) with the family, or co-operative multiplayer games with my wife. (In competitive computer games there's a strong danger that I'll win too easily and she'll lose interest.)
In recent years, the arrival of kids has been the time-suck that's taken me away from gaming. The little yappers are a bit too young to be able to join in yet. But when I do get the time, the fact that my wife and I haven't parted with any of our old consoles, coupled with backwards compatibility in PCs, means that we've got a huge back-catalog of games to re-visit, or ones we missed at the time but can pick up for cheap. (And the kids will get a good education in video game history too.) Portal, Paper Mario and Little Big Planet are three examples of games I missed the first time round but really enjoyed later. The latest to pop up on my "must take a closer look" horizon is Pikmin. It didn't interest me when the first game originally came out, but now it seems like it would suit my tastes.