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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   Printer-friendly
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?

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by everdred on Thursday January 10 2019, @01:33AM (1 child)

    by everdred (110) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 10 2019, @01:33AM (#784395) Homepage Journal

    You're dealing with a big perceptual filter there that skews your judgement: old games look bad by modern standards, and we subconsciously project "ugliness" to also possessing lots of other negative qualities.

    I don't mind the visual look of a lot of old games, but I do have a particular complaint with old FPS games that makes me wonder how I managed to play hundred hours of Doom and Quake in the 90s: a lot of them control horribly by modern standards. To my knowledge it was Half-Life that introduced the "WASD" layout, enabled full-time mouse-looking, and made the default left and right keys "strafe left/right" and not "turn left/right."

    Trying to go back and play an old 3D game without remapping nearly every key can be a nightmare.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Thursday January 10 2019, @02:33AM

    by Immerman (3985) on Thursday January 10 2019, @02:33AM (#784424)

    WASD + mouse was in the original System Shock four years earlier, along with jumping, multiple levels of crouching and leaning, and (key based) looking up and down, though they also used keys for turning and didn't use mouse-look, instead having an old-school FPRPG-style free cursor to interact with the world and interface. Not bad for a contemporary of Doom. (And a truly excellent game, one of the all-time classics in my book. I've played through it several times over the years, longing for mouselook more strongly every time - until eventually someone made a patch that added it. I wonder if they ever got it working properly in the fully free-rotation cyberspace...)

    2-axis mouse-look by default was definitely a big advancement, and it is hard going back. But while I would definitely say a modern game without mouselook would almost certainly be bad on those grounds alone, I don't think its fair to judge games created before it was dreamed up by those standards.