The spindown of my biggest hobby

posted: Tue Oct 12 02:40:51 UTC 2021

It's been over a week and I've not really had a desire to actually play any of my video games. This sounds insane because for me it kind of is. It's been my mainstay hobby for upwards of 20 years. Sure, I'll occasionally paint miniatures, I'll do tabletop RPG stuff (both as a player and as a GM), and I'll play with my little tech toys like I'm doing now. But dad gummit, after 20 years I'm pretty good at snagging headshots and generally have _gitten gud_. It was for a not-small portion of my life the number one thing I'd do with free time. I've been on a semi-competitive team; I've played and beaten entire games in a single sitting because _I knew I could_; I've spent probably as much time modding games like Skyrim or Oblivion as I have played them - which in the case of the Elder Scrolls is hundreds of hours apiece since Morrowind. I've been an alpha or beta tester on multiple occasions for games, back when that _meant_ something, instead of just being a gold star somebody puts on your account when you are dumb enough to buy an unfinished game before everybody else did.

> I've done the dailies, run the raids and otherwise feel like _I have done my time in this world of pixels and leetspeak._ Now I feel more and more like it's time to go somewhere else.

Background

For a little bit of an explainer or retrospective, here we go: I used to play games as a form of relaxation powered by a concept of escapism. It's hard to worry about the broke-ass reality of real life when I've got enough Septims to buy and outfit the best mansion in Skingrad. It's hard to realize I'm generally an indoorsy, hermit-like fellow IRL when I can romp around Middle Earth's many woodlands, mine some copper, murder some goblins, and take all the loot back to my happy little neighborhood south of Bree. It's hard to live in a corporate-powered world where the dreams and opportunities are predicated by dollar amounts that seem less and less believable for the average person ever to obtain (and I say this as a college-educated person who's been through the rigmarole of getting my pockets fleeced for a piece of paper that didn't teach me anything), when I can endlessly spawn in as yet another army man in yet another random desert conflict and rack up enough blood money to retire at 30, assuming that I don't die beforehand of a no-scoped rocket launcher shot at my attack helicopter.

Overall, it was definitely both a concept of escapism and a consistent theme of fiction, sometimes sci-fi and sometimes fantasy, that initially fueled my years-long conquest of singleplayer (or online but playable as a single person) games which have no real world value. Because even if my exploits in those games didn't have _real_ value, they somehow were a lot more tangible in the form of achievements, player character titles and cool weapons and armors than something (previously) so trivial as getting a small home for me and my wife.

Because guess what? I've got an assload of achievements on Steam, some of them pretty rare. I guess that's pretty cool for a nerd.

Do I own a house after working my ass off for half a decade to get educated and continue growing my career? PLEASE! This market's been inflating faster than I can re-educate myself and get raises to catch up with. At this point I've given up.

Wake me up when the stock market is on fire and the fancy financiers have all reclused themselves after watching their real-estate investments shrivel up like dead mold on pizza. Maybe then I'll be able to afford a 75-year-old house without paying what my parents did to build theirs brand-new 20 years ago.

The sociality is still present

But, I digress.

Somewhere along the way I started making friends online as a primary form of socializing, and started participating in and even administrating and building communities and game clans. This shifted my primary explanation or motivation for playing lots of video games (almost exclusively online with other people, now) because it was a form of sociality that I could actually agree with. I could float around, make e-friends, laugh at e-drama, and then find a new group of e-friends to act as a crutch when the old one went sour.

To this day I'm the admin (along with a friend) of a community that we've run for like, 5 years. It's a quiet one, for sure. But its' existence is guaranteed. It's there when somebody needs it. It's there when people want to hang out among the business of our rapidly divergent and consistently inconvenient life paths. Even if it's not the most active it's really hard to ever think about shutting the doors on that kind of connection. These are my friends, many of whom I've dealt with personally in live or even roomed with for sizable spans of time as we all traveled, during more adventurous, less burdened-by-love-and-taxes times. To this day I wonder how we're all still alive after some of the stupid crap we did. But that's a whole different _series_ of gemlog posts I might eventually get to.

And those are only people IRL that I now primarily interact with online. There's people multiple states away who I've never met, which I'd love to hang out with if I got the chance, and those exchanges of information would not have happened if I hadn't gone searching for a community for a specific game or a specific fanbase to call home, and found ones I liked.

It's hard to think of leaving

Having these long-term connections makes quitting these desktop video games a little dodgier. Because now, not only am I leaving behind a primary coping mechanism employed during long-term distress, I am also possibly cutting out a social aspect that I'm not sure has an analog, IRL replacement. At the very least I'm not in the mood to go join a shooting range club or hang out at my Local Game Store while Covid's dumpster fire is still going on. Mostly because even if I'm not having issues with catching Covid myself, I'd be sent home and quarantined and that makes working a pain in the aft end. I'd rather avoid that. So I wind up in a really weird headspace where _I patently don't even enjoy video games anymore_, but I'm also woefully underprepared for making any sort of non-trivial adjustments to a significant sector of my social and emotional balancing act, even if the impetus continues to grow (albeit slowly), and the ennui of modern gaming continues to leave me even less entertained or relaxed than it ever used to in years past.

But even harder to think of staying

But even after all of those pull-factors, I'm not really sure they outweigh the push-factor of my sheer lack of desire and engagement. The world of video games is increasingly industrialized, factory-made, monetized, and data-driven to new depths of depravity and shoddy workmanship. It's hard to furnish a reason to stay when it's almost as if angry playerbases, microtransactions and unfinished games are the new normal that _everybody wants._

I miss that somewhat rogueish, artisanal, but continually refined period of games from about the early 2000's to the early 2010's. We had surmounted the basic issues of computational power, connectivity and gameplay. _We made good games._ I miss those days dearly, but they are gone. I don't think any amount of booting up Minecraft Classic, Halo, or Neverwinter Nights will revive the glory days. So now, I guess all that's left is to saddle up and find new pastures.

TL;DR

So at the end of the day, here's what winds up happening:

I play a mobile game or two on my tablet if I have brainpower to burn arbitrarily and I want to get a dopamine hit from pixels instead of cookies, kisses, or kitty cuddles.

I spend a lot more time here in the smolnet, reading plain text and learning about different world views and experiences.

I do a lot more thinking about technical stuff.. I wonder what it would be like if I could get the infrastructure set up for a truly P2P network between me and those close to me.

I look at the calendar and realize "Oh crap, it's almost Halloween. Where did I put those CD's with Christmas music?"

I play fetch with my youngest cat, who I'm convinced is more of a dog (she even barks).

I go out on more adventure days with my wife, instead of racking up insane amounts of XP on the weekend doing fully stacked raids in some MMO, or doing multi-squad drops in an FPS.

And anyway, I wind up just spending a lot more time engaged in the world around me.

And somehow, despite it being a patently large hole in my to-do's every day and week so far,

I'm happier for doing so.

And I wonder what that says about the industry as a whole.

I just know my twitch shooter reflexes have already gone down the crapper. Time to take up badminton.

Contact Me

I don't do comments on gemini posts. Throw me an email if you're curious or have questions. Or slide into my Matrix DM's.. don't be surprised when I ignore you for a day or two, I don't always check either of them more than once or twice a day.

external email: wholesomedonut at tuta dot io

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