Post by: u/Village_Wide
I've seen many posts like "70% of us not gamers, we're testers". It is well known tendency. While I can't fully relate to this, I have a tendency that i'm not as interested in gaming as I used to be. While it quite normal, I'm willing to be sucked up by a game, but it has become harder.
For me(32y) it is sounds just sad. I started to play since my parents bought me Dreamcast back in 2000 year in Russia. After that, four of my friends and brothers become infected by it and bought Dreamcast. It was wild to play in such console, winter, Siberia, pure magic on your TV, something like Shenmue or Sonic Adventure 2 was captivating like another boundless world. Then I got PC and so on. I won't write my whole gaming history here. Just wanted to add a bit emotions and nostalgia into it.
After that were many games, I ended up with multiplayer ones. With steam deck I've done some cinematic games like Life is strange, stray.. but I'm struggling with solo gaming now.
What keeps you into gaming? Do you have some hacks or approaches to deal with it? I don't want to play in steam store, I would feel myself miserable because of it. It looks like a contemporary form of hoarding. For example, my brother has around 1000+ games, and he doesn't look much happy with it judging from what he says. I don't have something against this, just not my thing.
I have some personal approaches. For solo, I got used to finding something with strong story and many dialogues. Though i don't play much, I like competitive games like Rainbow Six siege or Overwatch. And the reason why i every evening play in steam deck is Moira. Yes Moira character in overwatch, she fits to steam deck gamepad ideally. You needn't much aim but a lot of tactics and there is escape and healing for any moment, very forgivable character that let you be effective and even a bit competitive. And if there was no moira i couldn't imagine what I would play then. Maybe I should get into docking and play via mouse/keyboard. I'm still find it interesting that one particular character keeps me into gaming. I wish there were more games, character like this to me. So, does someone have something like this?
There is also gaming industry that i think became worse because of marketing, buisness wants to interfere with the creative process. Seems like buisness has greater impact than it was back in old days when skill was more valued, it was not just high paid work in IT. I guess those guys were kind of wizards of that time in gamedev. I don't know though.
pedralm: As we get older we inevitably get gaming saturation (I'm 41).
For one, we have seen and played all genres and reiterations of those genres to exhaustion. They don't feel surprising or captivating. It's the same thing with another wrap. Innovation, risk and experience are getting more rare, especially with the rise of mega corporations that amass many studios and choke them out of creativity for the sake of playing safe for the business. This is where Indies come in with refreshing ideas and willing to take risks. It feels incredibly boring at my age to see another open world where most of the time is catch this, kill that, then just walk back and forth 75% of the time, boring writing altogether.
On the other hand, gaming is not as important or necessary with age. You have more stuff going on to attend to and can't just dedicate a lot of hours of your daily life to a game. This will also break some engagement with the game and keep interrupting your interest. Steam deck helps a lot with this because it facilitates access to your games.
Doesn't help that with time I have played a ton of games since the 80s and have still hundreds in the backlog of my steam library, most of them I suffer through because they're just... not captivating. So I "play test" I'd say more than 75% of them these days, and many others I play through to 75% of the game and then move to another. Some games are just too long for someone that plays one or two hours a day. Every game I consider starting, first thing I do is check howlongtobeat.com. and I am an RPG lover so my games of choice used to take 50-100 hours. Loved that journey. But that to me is like one full year of gaming at times.
So... Find something that you believe is compelling and actually keeps you engaged and is a good use of your time. I personally share this struggle.