Jump to content

Where did my gaming mojo go?


theSpirae

Recommended Posts

Hey guys,

 

I don't know what's happening with me, but maybe some of you may have experienced something similar, so you might shed some light on it.

 

I've been playing games since I was a kid, way over 20 years, and I always loved it. I love playing games, I want to play them, I bought tons of great titles but it just doesn't do anything for me these days. Last time I had really fun playing a game and being completely absorbed by it was in February when I started and finished the Witcher 3. After that, I started traveling so I didn't have that much time to play games. It's been almost three weeks since I got back home (still on my 3 months vacation) so I do have time to play games, I do want to play but no matter what game I start I lose interest very quickly.

 

TL:DR I have time to play games, I want to play games, but I simply don't enjoy it. Get me mah mojo back!!!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sounds like me.

 

Gaming is by far the coolest, most appealing hobby in my repertoire... plenty of games I'm interested in, I have time to play them.  I don't really get it.  People would say "take a break and you'll want to play more when you come back"... but I'm not playing games now.  This has been nothing but one big break. xD

 

There are a few things hanging me up I believe...

 

1. Games are too damn long.  I have time to play games, but not hours upon hours every single day.  Starting even a 25-50 hour game is overwhelming, and nowadays you can't seem to go anywhere without a single player game being some repetitive open world (or semi-open world) time waster.  Occasionally you get a cool one like God of War or Hollow Knight.  By and large though, pretty meh.

 

2. I collect physical copies of games.  Especially in the case of limited/collectors copies of games, I'm very hesitant about opening them and losing value.  Plus for whatever reason taking discs in and out feels much more conclusive than digital was (when I played on PC).  I don't want to swap discs every other hour as I start a game, give up, start a new game, give up, rinse and repeat until I find one that sticks or that I'm in the mood for.  The finality of opening a game and putting it into the console is also a little overwhelming... as weird and unrelate-able as that probably is.

 

3. I personally have trouble dealing with stress, generally speaking gaming isn't "easy" enough for me to just sit and relax with it.  And the easy games run a serious risk of crossing the border into boring.  Rightfully or not, I've been feeling the stress lately.  Work, family, life.  Big stress or small stress.  I can only seem to game if things are "just right".

Edited by Dreakon13
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've been gaming since 1991, and the video game industry is a completely different beast from the one I remember all those years ago.

 

I think a lot of people are missing the fact that we are growing older. My tastes have changed a lot since I was a kid in grade school and these days I can't be bothered playing just any old game like I used to.

 

There's also the fact that technology has evolved to the point where we can just grab any game we want if we do so much as wait for a Flash sale or just grab it because it catches our interests. These days you can just log on to Amazon.com, order a game you want, set the shipping to one day and have it delivered to your door just like that. You don't have to rent a game at Blockbuster, that is pretty much a thing of the past.

 

Games in general are cheaper so playing a lot of them is a lot less alluring. That is thanks to technology and the gaming industry being much bigger than it was 20 years ago.

 

There are other hobbies out there besides playing video games.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Spaz said:

There are other hobbies out there besides playing video games.

 

Never understood this suggestion, in response to someone who clearly wants to continue gaming.

 

Be like someone saying, "I'm tired of the same old boring food... how can I have a little more fun cooking and making food?" and responding that there's other things to do besides eating/cooking! xD  Who does that help.

Edited by Dreakon13
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've been playing video games since 1998 or 1999, so I was 2 or 3 years old back then. Up until around mid 2013, I was hooked on playing games (especially during the PS2 and PS3 eras), and it was especially fun trying out various different type of games when I grew up mostly playing racing games, Mario, and Pokemon. xD

 

But around mid-2013, my interest in gaming... shifted. It fell off a considerable amount by 2014, but it never really died. Honestly, I think it was due to the fact that I had started shifting my focus towards other things that it took time away from gaming. The specific factors are:

1. College - I actually started college in 2014, since that's when I graduated, but during that entire senior year of high school, I was spending a lot of energy trying to get accepted into universities, and that was around the time I started playing PC games more. Once college started, I didn't bring my PS3 (or PS4 once I got it) until my senior year, so there would be multiple weeks at a time I wouldn't even touch them, and even while I was at home, I still wouldn't play them. Sometimes, the longer I'm away from something, the less likely I'll get back to it.

 

2. Music - Basically, around 2013 was also when I started making music (for those who've known me years ago, not talking about LBP2 stuff :P), so that definitely shifted focus away from playing games. This is less of a factor though, especially now since I've been gaming a lot more over the last year or so.

 

3. Games Themselves - Nowadays I find it difficult to stay... hooked, to a game. A lot of games just simply don't capture the same kind of fun factor I had in games past, though I'm not exactly sure why. It's not like the quality of games has really dipped (not to my knowledge, at least), but maybe what happened is that my expectations for games has changed, when they're not met, it's difficult to want to pick the game back up. I started noticing this issue around late 2012, just around the tie life started getting more stressful on my end. It could possibly be the shift in the way games are made in general that's a factor to this as well (like the use of microtransactions - not microtransactions themselves, but how they're implemented).

 

So maybe stress has something to do with it? I don't know, but what I do know is that if I take a long-enough break from gaming (after exceeding that 'losing interest threshhold), I start to miss it, I start to remember all of the fun I had in recent favorites, and I get the urge to play them again. Next thing you know, I start going for one reachable plat, and then the next, and the next...

 

TL;DR: My gaming mojo is very dependent on how my priorities in real life shift around depending on my situation, and sometimes it gets in the way of enjoying games when I have "X" thing on my mind, whether that be college (I've graduated a few months ago now) or whatever, or the game itself is simply underwhelming due to my taste in games shifting slower than the shift in gaming trends.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

52 minutes ago, Dreakon13 said:

 

Never understood this suggestion, in response to someone who clearly wants to continue gaming.

 

Be like someone saying, "I'm tired of the same old boring food... how can I have a little more fun cooking and making food?" and responding that there's other things to do besides eating/cooking! xD  Who does that help.

 

I worded my post wrong. 

 

I suggest just playing the games that interest you. If that still doesn’t satisfy you then perhaps you need to take a break from gaming and find something that makes you happy. 

 

Always good to take regular breaks.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 hours ago, Spaz said:

 

I worded my post wrong. 

 

I suggest just playing the games that interest you. If that still doesn’t satisfy you then perhaps you need to take a break from gaming and find something that makes you happy. 

 

Always good to take regular breaks.

 

But the OP said it's been months since they last seriously played anything, since they've been traveling.  I'd call that a "break", wouldn't you?

 

From experience, I don't think the answer is to take a break.  That's not going to make the feeling of starting some 50-100 hour epic less overwhelming (if anything it'll be more overwhelming since few other hobbies can prepare you for that kind of overt and fleeting dedication).  I think the answer is to just be a little stubborn, pick a game that seems good and stick it out to the end.  No matter what.  Even if you feel yourself getting tired of it or bored.  Maybe something shorter (ie. 10-15 hours?) but not too easy.

 

Granted I never was great at the trophy hunting thing, but that's what I did when I found myself losing interest too quickly when I first tried getting into it.  Driving home from work one day I just said "fuck it, I'm going to platinum Uncharted 1... no matter what".  And I did, and I really got into it.  Wasn't a difficult game or anything, but I just didn't have the motivation to do it before that day.  And that's all it took.

 

...

 

That's kinda the nice thing about trophies.  Games today are so open ended... even the mostly linear single player games have 100 endings to unlock.  You never quite know when to say you're done, because if you stop when the credits roll, you may still be missing half the game (or more)... and without some sort of roadmap you may not even realize it.  It's kinda nuts if you think about it.  The platinum at least gives you that sense of completion, where you can take a deep breath, smile and put the game back on the shelf finally.  I really think I miss that, since I bailed on trophies in general a while ago.

Edited by Dreakon13
Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 hours ago, Dreakon13 said:

 

But the OP said it's been months since they last seriously played anything, since they've been traveling.  I'd call that a "break", wouldn't you?

 

From experience, I don't think the answer is to take a break.  That's not going to make the feeling of starting some 50-100 hour epic less overwhelming (if anything it'll be more overwhelming since few other hobbies can prepare you for that kind of overt and fleeting dedication).  I think the answer is to just be a little stubborn, pick a game that seems good and stick it out to the end.  No matter what.  Even if you feel yourself getting tired of it or bored.  Maybe something shorter (ie. 10-15 hours?) but not too easy.

 

Granted I never was great at the trophy hunting thing, but that's what I did when I found myself losing interest too quickly when I first tried getting into it.  Driving home from work one day I just said "fuck it, I'm going to platinum Uncharted 1... no matter what".  And I did, and I really got into it.  Wasn't a difficult game or anything, but I just didn't have the motivation to do it before that day.  And that's all it took.

 

...

 

That's kinda the nice thing about trophies.  Games today are so open ended... even the mostly linear single player games have 100 endings to unlock.  You never quite know when to say you're done, because if you stop when the credits roll, you may still be missing half the game (or more)... and without some sort of roadmap you may not even realize it.  It's kinda nuts if you think about it.  The platinum at least gives you that sense of completion, where you can take a deep breath, smile and put the game back on the shelf finally.  I really think I miss that, since I bailed on trophies in general a while ago.

 

Well again, could be losing interest or the games themselves fail to captivate you.

 

I decided to toss out the short, easy platinum route because I just wasn't having any fun playing them. I've gone after longer, more difficult platinums. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, while not that difficult to begin with, is rather long, usually taking 100 hours or so for most people. I've spent over 110 hours on this game and I'm currently playing the DLC. I've enjoyed every minute I invested into The Witcher 3. I highly recommend this game to anyone who enjoys fantasy themed RPGs.

 

And like I said, we are getting older. Tastes change over time and that's no different to me than it probably is for you and the OP. Back in the day I could sit for hours upon hours playing a Nintendo 64 game or a Playstation 1/Playstation 2 game and not get bored. Now I can barely play a lot of games out there without getting turned off or failing to catch my attention for more than a couple of hours.

 

I don't know what else to say. Try hard to pick a game you think you will enjoy, regardless of how easy or hard it is and see if that really grabs your attention enough to keep playing. People I've known in real life who quit video games felt they just didn't interest them anymore and they moved on in their lives.

Edited by Spaz
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I wouldn't worry about it.

 

Played my Commodore 64 to death

Played my Commodore Amiga to death

Played my SNES every now and then, that was the time I was doing lots of other things

Played my PS1 quite a lot, had other things going on

Hardly played my PS2, doing other things

Played the PS3 a decent amount despite family commitments

Played the PS4 a decent amount despite family commitments

 

I've been gaming over 30 years, you have times where you lose interest, that's just the way it is. If it's in your blood though you'll come back at some point. Don't try and force it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...