I haven't played video games in a while, and the main reason is that I find them tedious now. They just aren't fun. It's very likely that I am the one who changed, probably for the better, but I think something has definitely changed. It seems to me that the main drive behind video games in the past was to build something cool. Now the main motivation seems to be to build something that people play for as long as possible, even if there is nothing interesting going on.
It is quite obvious for the games that are glorified slot machines, like the ARPGs in line of Diablo 3, but it is also true for multiplayer competitive games, where the matchmaking is in many ways a slot machine. But even single player games these days feel to me like a long list of fetch quests: get X so you can get Y that allows you to go to Z and talk to A and ...
I don't know, this is a half-baked thought, but it's sort of the point of these monthly posts. Maybe most video games always had this obsession with making the player do things, even if they were meaningless, but I certainly didn't feel that way when I was younger.
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2024-03-30