Paingod wrote: ↑Thu Jul 09, 2020 3:15 pmMan, ditto that. I've been struggling so hard at finding a game to captivate me that I've started learning Unity to try and make my own.Blackhawk wrote: ↑Thu Jul 09, 2020 2:44 pmThis has been spring and summer 2020 for a lot of us. I've actually spent quite a bit of time reexamining what I get out of games, and asking whether I still get that. Or if I still need it.Eel Snave wrote: ↑Thu Jul 09, 2020 2:22 pm I'm perturbed because there aren't any games interesting me at the moment. I don't feel like playing anything too complicated or anything where I have to learn an interface, so I'm just playing the same old boring games I play all the time. I feel like I need to reignite it somehow, but I can't.
I'm getting close with figuring out some stuff on Retroarch that'll make it more useful, but until then I'm borrrreeeeeed.
When I started gaming (heavily), it was because I was unhappy, lost, and needed the escape. That was more than 25 years ago. I've gone to college, gotten married, had a kid, gotten divorced, gotten married again, had more kids, gotten divorced, my kids have mostly grown (two adults, one almost there), gotten back together with my ex-wife. I chased religion for years, discarded religion for reason. I've gone from unable to legally buy a drink to never getting carded. I'm not that same unhappy, lost kid anymore. And I don't need the escape anymore. But nearly every element in my life (my hobby, my financial investments, my social connections, my family's routine, activities with the kids...) is built around gaming, so when I remove it from the equation, there's mostly just dead time. Once the family settles in for the night, the only real empty space that's left is my gaming computer.
And so I do what I've done for years: I go looking for a game. But instead of a sense of satisfaction (which I no longer need to get from gaming), I get nothing. So I quit. Dead time. Look for game. Nothing.
"Doctor, it hurts when I do this!"
Another factor, and this is something I've thought a lot about over the past couple of months and have read a lot about: gaming has changed so much in the last 15 years, and a lot of it stems from the MMO revolution of early 2000s. I'm not talking about some subjective "In my day..." rant here, I'm talking about a fundamental change from a design perspective. More specifically, the gameplay reward loop has completely changed. Instead of slowly working toward a big reward, games are designed to give constant small rewards. Instead of resolving a long story beat or finally making your way to a destination, you're constantly leveling up, unlocking something, collecting some hidden thing, or finding new loot. It's like an endless stream of little doses of dopamine spread out across the entirety of the game. Gamers are so used to it that if they go more than five or ten minutes without some sort of reward, they get bored and wander off, so developers are almost forced to design around it, usually at the expense of narrative flow, engagement, and building a sense of curiosity and wonder. We continue to game out of inertia.
It creates this mental state where your mind is trying to find that same constant reward loop in anything else you try to do. Read a book, build something, work on a craft, be artistic, study. Your brain keeps looking for the reward that it has been trained to expect every five minutes, and it's no longer there. Your brain responds by looking elsewhere. That either comes through craving 'gaming' without enjoying the games themselves, or through constant distraction. We have literally forgotten how not to game.
