Video game fatigue?

man I have been riding that wave length recently too and it feels real nice not to care. I used to try and be aware or watch pop culture TV stuff to make it easier to talk to people at work, but it’s not worth it. I’d rather just be weird to talk to. I have very limited time and I wanna use it by going home to hang out with my animals and partner and play sf6 or like watch a movie that’s interesting to me while stoned.

wrt fatigue in video games, but I think applies to all media consumption, is that it’s inherently interesting to find new things. I kinda flit around the things I’m interested in like minty and fathertorque said. There’s so much cool stuff to consume, it’s overwhelming sometimes. Also, games sure can be long

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I’m in a phase where I only play Street Fighter 6 and Streets of Rage 4 it reminds me of 30 years ago when I only played Street Fighter II and Streets of Rage 2.

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my 2cents as someone who is basically (imo) the iconic example of this:

(in other words, i still get a lot out of actively following video game news and stuff as a sort of hobby, but don’t really devote that much time to actually playing games. i am actually getting back into it, but for me this means playing one game for an hour or so a day until i finish it, not doing that for a few weeks/months, then doing it again for a bit)

anyway, i actually think video game fatigue is probably something that is good and healthy to experience. some of this is definitely just ‘phases of life’ stuff as has been discussed. but i also think that video games themselves are changing, mostly because of capitalism and other very bad reasons.

the amount of time and money someone is expected to put into following video games at like a “elite gamer” level is really just ridiculous these days. in the past couple months, street fighter, zelda, diablo, and final fantasy have all had new installments. if you’re the type of person who finds it necessary to put in the work to keep up with all of these things at the pace they will be memed and like, enter the culture, that’s hundreds of dollars and potentially thousands of hours. because i still do follow “the culture” without actually participating, i can also sense that there is this very gentle but still persistent social pressure to keep up, which may be part of the reason one might feel guilty or in the very least experience “FOMO” by falling behind.

i can sense it because i do sort of feel it. like totk is the first game i’ve played this close to release in as long as i can remember, and i’m still “behind” basically everyone else talking about the game online. with other big stuff like elden ring, part of me is like… should i? like i know how fun it would be to be discovering all the stuff at the same time as everyone else. but even though i’m aware of the possibility i just never follow through, and i think that’s actually for the best.

i sound like i’m being very boring and pedantic for saying this but: video games are supposed to be fun! if you are not having fun doing it, it is totally natural and normal and good to just stop doing it. there is nothing wrong with that!

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just to cite one small example of how i think video games have become super commercially exploitative, is how the same culture around ‘preordering’ and stuff still exists even though there is no such thing as scarcity in the era of digital releases anymore.

i know most of us are actually old enough to remember this, but as a reminder, you know back in “the day” preordering was kind of a necessity because you had no way of knowing how many copies of a game your store would get, and there could be many days between shipments. this was particularly acute in the n64 era iirc. like, imagine if every big game that got released was available in the same way that ps5 consoles have been trickling out and so on.

the game publishers and game stop have managed to perpetuate that system with preorder bonuses and special editions and shit, and now we’re like two decades away from the era when preordering was the only way to be sure you could get the game as close to release as possible. free yourself from this madness!

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One thing I can at least say for myself is I have never felt any variety of this

and can only understand it intellectually after a lot of experience, I can’t really empathize with it. Who gives a shit what other people are doing. I’ll get to it when I get to it.

I suppose a lot of it is a desire to be part of “the conversation” but all the most valuable videogames writing I’ve ever read has been written long after, usually years after, the games in question were released. Indeed, it’s almost necessary to wait that long to get a good enough perspective on how these games affected the medium and the culture before you can say anything really interesting about them. “The conversation” is basically advertising. It’s just another element of the capitalist machine.

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I have basically given up on being current with the gaming scene, there are a few personal favorite games or series where I’ll be playing the game near release as… I just really want to play those games but otherwise I am always getting to things a few years down the road. I’d probably be playing the new Zelda if I had a Switch, I have about a 50-50 chance of getting to a big From game near release and I’ll probably be day 1 on the big Rockstar openworld games as I just love wandering around those worlds, but that’s about it.

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This is all because we let E3 die. It was protecting us by trapping the spirit of commercialism inside the Los Angeles Convention Center, it’s powers kept at bay through yearly rituals and prayers by the masses. But now it’s spilling out unrestrained all of the year, with Geoff Keighly as it’s shepherd.

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For me, some sources of fatigue are learning new gimmicks / systems in every game. E.g. how to perform a special action; for Psychonauts, it could be to use specific super powers at the right time, remembering to press the right buttons/combinations of buttonts, and so on. For Final Fantasy 7R, it would be, for example, micromanage the party in terms of equipment, materia, in order to have the edge in combat. For this specific case, I am playing the game on easy mode to be able to afford to play sloppily and still be able to appreciate the personality of the game (it has its own charismatic moments, even if it’s a bit too pop for me).

Other, deeper sources of fatigue, are when having to face a level, just to overcome “yet another challenge”. This is a bit tricky to explain. It’s when a game loses a layer of immersivity, which gets replaced by yet another game loop.
All games are there to pose challenges, but some of them manage to put it in a more seamless way… Sekiro, Elden Ring, Dark Souls, but also other games like Live a Live, La Mulana, Hollow Knight… these games flow and do not seem just a series of challenges piled up. Still, I am not sure I am managing to grasp why. Maybe because the atmosphere is so great, or they are so well integrated.

For example, one reason for I didn’t like Doom 2016 much, was that it was just a sequence of arenas. While I liked Quake Remastered so much, because it felt like an adventure.

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Unfortunately for my backlog I have game playing fatigue but not game acquisition fatigue

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I just started playing Elden Ring again after a year-long break. I quit after beating Radahn, so I still had a lot of game left to play. Elden Ring is one of my favorites of all time, but after 70 hours or so I needed a break. Back at it a year later and I’m having fun again.

One thing that is relevant to the observations about the discourse is that all the Elden Ring youtube videos are a year old now. I don’t know if it is because the content well has been emptied(everything has been covered by this point) or if there is no longer an appetite for new Elden Ring content.

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Select Button Enters Middle Age.

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i don’t think i made it through more than three levels of Psychonauts. like i respect it, but i don’t want to play it, at all

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any minute now this is going to become a site for people into photography who don’t play videogames

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It’ll be so gradual we won’t even notice

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I’LL NEVER STOP GAMEING

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I am very much looking forward to seeing what games get made for the senior citizen veteran gamer audience.

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