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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: 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.