So, a video game youtuber I've gotten into in the past few years named Arrrash has made a video about gaming not being fun any more, and he kinda chalked it up to his age and the fact that the brain doesnt value new experiences like it values old experiences. And while this isn't the kind of subject matter i normally discuss on here, I think it's worth mentioning from a personal/life perspective. I don't know.
Anyway, I have been noticing that gaming isn't giving me the dopamine rush in recent years that it used to, and how as I've entered my 30s, gaming just...isn't appealing to me as much as it used to either. Although, I have a different take on it than him. There's a lot of factors worth considering, but I have felt, since 2016 or so, gaming has changed, and not for the better. And I notice games dont draw me like they used to any more. To some extent, this might be me, but when I really reflect on it, I think a lot of it is gaming itself.
So a bit of background, I'm a millennial, I'm in my mid 30s, and I feel like gaming has grown up with me. Atari was before my time, but I'm familiar with many of those games. I've played some 8 bit era games when I was young, but I didn't really get into it until the 16 bit era (Sega Genesis vs SNES). I was always a bit of a sega fanboy and loved sonic, but also, I did play nintendo at other peoples' houses. I switched to nintendo 64 as we went into the next generation, seeing the writing on the wall for sega, and loved many of those games. Super mario 64, mariokart, turok, star fox 64, goldeneye, etc., I played many of the classics and loved them. I also got into some PC classics like doom and quake in the late 90s as well. I went back to sega with the dreamcast, but that died so i got a PS2. This was a bit of an era in which I temporarily "grew out of" gaming. I bought the PS2 due to peer pressure, but it was honestly the worst choice for me game wise. I was much more of an xbox kind of guy, or game cube, for the nintendo classics. The stuff people played on PS2 was always overhyped, and during this time i was a bit less into gaming. If anything I liked GBA more than console games and played stuff like pokemon and advance wars in this era. My PC wasnt strong enough to play PC games, and yeah, this was mostly just a lost era for me gaming wise. But that changed with the next generation where I went to the xbox 360 and eventually settled on being a primarily PC gamer.
I mean over the years, I've played tons of different consoles, and tons of different games, and things were mostly hit and miss for me. Sometimes I was into it, and sometimes I really wasn't. I loved the GBA for example, and bought a DS and initially loved it, but given its library had a lot of shovel ware and the modern equivalent of mobile games, part of me really didn't. And again, there was the PS2 era for me which I was blah on. But I'd say from 2005-2016ish is what I'd consider the golden era of more modern gaming. There were just so many titles and franchises that I loved during this time period. So many staples I came to love. But I will say that since then, gaming doesnt give me the dopamine hit it used to. Why?
Again, I feel like gaming itself changed.
Around the beginning of this era, 2004-2007ish, I was wowed. I got into halo, COD, and a lot of other modern stables of gaming. As I shifted to PC I got into battlefield, etc. And these franchises all put out mainline games every year. I remember loving fallout 3, new vegas, skyrim, and honestly, I remember 2011 in particular being an amazing year for gaming between MW3, Battlefield 3, Minecraft, and Skyrim. 2016 was another similar year, with Doom, Overwatch, Rainbow Six Siege (technically a 2015 title but i played it in 2016), Battlefield 1, and Titanfall 2 all being amazing titles. But then, it kind of dropped off.
Why?
Again, gaming changed. Let me explain. After 2016, 2017 felt like a rather dead year. I mean, in retrospect the only game I truly enjoyed was PUBG. And that kind of marked a shift in gaming. PUBG did two things. First, it introduced battle royale to the world, which kind of marked a shift away from traditional multiplayer for a while, and toward battle royale. it also helped give rise to the era of esports, twitch streaming, and hardcore gaming.
I've always been on the casual side of multiplayer gaming. I'd play stuff like COD, battlefield, titanfall, and many f2p titles and the like. But with PUBG and the rise of twitch streaming, gaming went hardcore. Hardcore gaming always existed, but it mostly existed on its little corner of the internet full of weirdo elitists who largely stayed in their little communities. I remember in the 2000s everyone hyped Counter Strike. I tried CS Source in 2008 and I hated it. It felt very underwhelming. Very sweaty and try hard. The mechanics were difficult, the game play boring, but everyone acted like its the greatest thing since sliced bread. Whenever I dare criticize the game I'd be met by complains of "hurr durr you just suck", I admit I did, but i just didnt find that really hardcore competitive gaming environment to be fun. I tended to play games for around 100-200 hours and then dump them for next year's title. Now we were expected to put 100-200 hours into a game just to learn how to play it? No thanks. I'll pass. I like to game for fun. But, post 2016, games started appealing more and more to this try hard element, and by 2018, I was finding franchises I had come to love slowly changing, COD became a bit more sweaty with BO4's specialist system. Battlefield 5 felt very punishing, as the more sweaty part of the player base felt the series had gotten "too casual" and that "lone wolf players" had to be punished because "battlefield is a team game". Now...I'd been playing the franchise since like 2008, and I can tell you, those early games sucked. They were very punishing to infantry players and solo players and i always saw them as flawed. Since then newer titles from Bad Company 2 through BF1 all improved on the formula to the point I felt more welcome playing them, but BF5 always had this really hardcore punishing feeling. BF2142 despite its flaws felt more casual friendly at first but given the sweats screamed bloody murder over the removal of the class system and the devs gave in and appeased them, it's gotten a bit worse there.
The point is, since 2016 there's been a shift from casual fun game play toward more competitiveness. And that actually made games harder, and given my declining reflexes as I get older, I feel unable to keep up with these games as well. Theyre making gaming less welcoming to players like me.
Second of all, lets discuss single player. In the 2005-2015 era there were tons of good single player games. Many of them feel nostalgic. In recent years, many single player games just lack the amount of fun. Game play is more shallow, there's more of a focus on quantity over quality, and on the flip side a lot of games are just too narrative driven. Some narrative is good but given gaming started off to me as "here's a gun, go shoot things", narrative was never a focus for me. Now you got these beautiful single player games that play like movies but the game play just lacks something. Sure sometimes the old franchises put out some good games, I remembered liking doom eternal, but honestly, COD campaigns feel gimmicky now. A lot of franchises just have tacked on campaigns at best. And having replayed the old halo games via MCC, i have to say that "they just dont make them like they used to". Even Halo infinite's multiplayer mode felt like it focused on quantity over quality. It had this massive open world but the actual campaign was...one of the weaker ones in the series. It didnt have the magic.
The same is true of multiplayer, going back to that. A lot of the focus on engagement is in the form of battle passes and grinding, which makes games feel like work. I might spent a lot of hours trying to unlock something, but it really feels more like work than fun. In the past i played games for fun. Now i forgo playing some games to stick to the MP grind because "I have to get to level 40 on that battlepass to unlock this gun before it expires". It sucks.
And if you stop playing MP games and try to get back into this years later, because you havent kept up on them, you gotta relearn them from the beginning and you get stomped as if you were a noob. So it kinda keeps people on a "keep playing or become irrelevant" mindset, which is bad for gaming. I never did this in the past. The incentives in the past were just...different. But modern gaming has become a focus on logging in lots of sub par hours where im barely having fun, over quality hours.
I mean, if I did this in previous years and decades I'd have the same problem. I always got annoyed with games and their flaws and rage quit after a while. I'd just stop playing, and then go back to the game months later if it was any good. Nowadays, i play games i should really stop playing long after they stop being fun just to stay on top of the grind. Gaming shouldnt feel like a job, but sadly, they kind of are going that way.
That said, all in all, is my malaise with gaming really a matter of gaming not being fun? Maybe a little, but I think the big factor is that gaming has changed. Theres less focus on quality, more on quantity. Gaming is more like a job. Gaming is more hyper competitive, and while in the past, i gamed more for fun, in the present, gaming often feels like a chore, and it shouldnt feel that way. There is always an ebb and flow to life. If that ebb and flow is natural, the experience feels more natural and is more enjoyable. if it is more forced, it's less fun.
Gaming just isn't what it used to be. There's more focus on grinding, there's more focus on competitiveness. There's more focus on quantity over quality. And somewhere in the process, gaming has lost its charm. I can still lose myself in a game if something really mind blowing comes out. But in recent years, I find myself playing the games i play to death, and waiting years for new titles to come out to replace them. Fewer titles appeal to my tastes because gaming has, to some extent moved on from my preferences, and the ones that do exist often have a much different philosophy than they used to that makes them less fun.
It's like gaming went from being a fun hobby to this all emcompassing grind, putting people on a treadmill of competitiveness and keeping up on battle passes that might cause me to log more hours into certain titles, but at the expense of enjoying those titles less.
At least that's how I view it. For me, it's less about me changing, but more about gaming as a whole changing. As Abe Simpson once said in the simpsons. "I was "with it" once, but then they changed what "it" was, one day it will happen to you". That's basically how I feel as I get older. It's not that Im not "with it" any more, it's about what "it" is is changing, and I'm just not changing with it, leading to less enjoyment and somewhat of a nostalgia for the past. I acknowledge games in the past had flawed too, but games in the present are, in some ways, declining. It's just how the business has grown.
No comments:
Post a Comment