Gaming and Real Life

PirateNinja

My hope with this thread is to go a little deeper, and I think the Icrontic audience fits the bill.

Games don't give me the same feeling they used to. I used to get immersed in a game. Ocarina of Time for example became my entire reality when I played it. I didn't even have to play, I could watch my brother play for hours and be completely entranced by the story and the emotion. Games like Quake II, Warcraft II, Morrowind, etc ... they used to be a complete experience for me. Not just 20-40 hours of bland entertainment. Multiplayer gaming was a complete amazement. Counter-Strike, and more, took up massive hours of my youth because the feeling I got from playing the game was so real.

Today, gaming is boring. No matter if it is the ultra high end brand new stuff, or the old school things that I have fond memories of. I just can't get in to it like I used to. I play for 30 minutes begrudgingly, while thinking of my larger responsibilities in life. I invest in high-end gaming gear, and many new games; yet even then I can usually not bear to put enough time in to a game to even finish it.
Honestly, I miss the escape. Life is great without it, but I miss it all the same.

Does anyone here know how to get back in to the game? Or, is this just part of getting old?

Thrax

You got older and more cynical. I just recently went through something of the same thing myself, and it took community to get me back into it.

Getting roped back into serious gaming at work, as well as being coaxed back into IC TF2 has made me every bit the gamer I was in my teens. Ditto playing games like Section 8: Prejudice, Borderlands and Neverwinter Nights 2 with ICers.

MMOs also had a hand in "ruining" normal games for me along the way, as it was difficult to get back into the mindset that not every game had 2400 hours of content to experience.

Slayer5227

I don't get the same feeling I use to as a little kid when I play a game it's a whole new feeling it's like any game that can test my skills or test my brain and make me think I really enjoy. I think taste may change as you get older and not necessarily that you're bored but you haven't acquired a new taste in gaming or possibly you just need a break from it. Too much of a good thing is never good.

PirateNinja

Thrax wrote:

You got older and more cynical. I just recently went through something of the same thing myself, and it took community to get me back into it.

Getting roped back into serious gaming at work, as well as being coaxed back into IC TF2 has made me every bit the gamer I was in my teens. Ditto playing games like Section 8: Prejudice, Borderlands and Neverwinter Nights 2 with ICers.

MMOs also had a hand in "ruining" normal games for me along the way, as it was difficult to get back into the mindset that not every game had 2400 hours of content to experience.

That's interesting, I think I just need more exposure to community events. I get, what I think, is a similar rush out of running my old web hosting business and billing clients. The thrill of collecting money and maximizing my returns is fun. It has reality built in to it, just like community supported events and matches do.

Perhaps my imagination just hit the crapper now that reality has set in, and without some friendly encouragement I can't start the imagination engine any more.

If anything I'm more involved with this community than I was in the past, so hopefully I can get back to the fun of it all. I look to Leonardo and wonder if all I need to do is fold with my virtual self, and get back to "reality" with the rest of me. If points mean anything at all, they may as well mean a small chance of furthering our understanding of existence.

Butters

PirateNinja wrote:

Does anyone here know how to get back in to the game? Or, is this just part of getting old?

I think we all go through it. I think our experiences are similar, I fondly remember War2 and Kali being my biggest thrill. Counter-Strike was the original game led me here over decade ago, along with all of IC's original renegade hijinks.

Its the slippery slope of life and games. I now think about completing the projects I have at work and have little desire to shoot a couple of portals in a wall and jump in it.

I think at this point in my life, I feel the more time I spend playing games, the less time I have spending time with my wife and kid, learning new skillsets for work, do projects around the house.

Though at the same time, I do game at whenever chance I get. Its still a necessity, but definately not what it once was and I accept that.

primesuspect

Mostly it's adulthood, marriage, growing up, etc. The further you get away from being able to devote solid 8-10 hours a day into gaming, the less a part of your life it becomes. I barely play games anymore at all. I miss it, but I don't. Does that make sense?

GnomeWizardd

this is sooooo me right now. I am trying everything to get back into it. But I honestly dont know If I can. 2 kids now and when I try I rather sleep! lol I just recently bought dragon age 2 for my mac and I plan on getting into that but I dunno. I bought the strat guide online so i can read it on my breaks at work in hope that it might get me wanting to play. All gaming is dead to me now it sucks! sports too. All I want to do is get back to being me and Its weird I cant!

I played SC 2 the other day, I rolled through the other guys online and after my demoralizing victory I was like Meh. That was ok

I am awaiting Diablo III tho. Maybe its because that game is all I am wanting to play and its throwing me off?

Thank God I havent gotten tired of my comic books tho!

Cliff_Forster

I have so many Steam specials in my backlog. I was surprised when I fit Portal 2 in a week or so ago. I imagine many got through the single player sitting down, maybe twice. Took me a chamber here, another there, in the way, it was the perfect adult play experience because I could play for fifteen minutes accomplish a little something, play another fifteen minutes, get a little further. I bet I started and stopped playing about twenty times over the course of a week to get through it.

I actually shy away from games that I know have single player campaigns of more than 15 hours or so, because I just know its never going to happen.

Winfrey

I'm glad we've brought this issue out into the open. So we can share how each of us have dealt with "The Midlife Gaming Crisis".

You buy that fancy computer and the new fangled games and realize your life just isn't being fulfilled by them anymore. You start to wonder "what have i done in my gaming life?" "has it really been worth it?" "WTF PRINCESS ISN'T IN THIS CASTLE".

Halfway through the last level of perfecting Super Meat Boy you just stop and leave the controller.

Things have changed man, they'll never be the same again.

PirateNinja

I guess I thought it would be like novels. I can still sit down and read a book and love it, the same way I did when I was a kid. I can get wrapped up in it.

Gaming is just, ehhh. It's so ironic because now I can finally afford that great system and any game I want really. I just can't get in to it. I still pass the time by playing games, but they just aren't the same.

Oh growing up. I need to just have some kids already so I stop caring as much about this stuff.

primesuspect

Kids actually reinvigorate the experience for a while, if you share your love of gaming with them.

Make sure you raise them with NES and other classics so they have a solid gaming background

Slayer5227

This is one thing I fear, not loving games anymore or being wrapped up in them. I hope to always love and enjoy games but I'm sure real life will take over at some point.

fatcat

I've gotten to a point where if a game is not as good as another game I love, I just can't spend the time to play it. "I've wasted these 3 hours playing this game, when I could have been playing a game I know I love"

I'm waiting for Diablo 3
I'm waiting for Mass Effect 3
I'm waiting for Battlefield 3
I'm waiting for Darksiders 2

These games I know I will lose countless hours in. I really want to play the Deus Ex game, but I also got in to that bad habit of "wait for the steam sale"

I have around 70 games in steam, and I just can't bring myself to play any of them, unless they are awesome (and support eyefinity)

The most fun game I am playing right now is Darksiders. I wish there was more games this style

Winfrey

I enjoy novels I liked as a kid but for different reasons that i had as a kid. At least the good novels.

Preacher

Our interests and desires naturally change and evolve as we age. Gaming is no exception. Additionally, we lose much of the free time we had in our youth as demands are placed on us by family, friends, work, and other responsibilities. With less free time as well as more maturity and responsibility, it's only natural that games don't seem as vivid or amaze us often as they did when we were young. Regardless of what it is, I find myself much harder to surprise and impress then when I was young. For me, this is true not only for games, but for movies, novels, food, etc.

Having said all that, I still love games. And I am well into middle age! I still find TF2 to be fun and IC TF2 to be EPIC. I also love single player FPS like ME, Bioshock, and Dead Space and playing the single player RTS campaigns of Starcraft/Warcraft. I totally lost interest in WoW due to the learning curve and complexity, but have found renewed interest in LoL with Icrontians (who accept my pronounced lack of talent). Thanks to Rex (and Cola, Spence, Cherplunka, Lynx, Duck, Winfrey, Waba, Kush, Hitman, Nem, BobbyDidi, Ryokyo, and others) for exposing me and welcoming me to another great game to play with great people.

While you may forever lose your interest in games, I would recomend you try some new ones in genres that you haven't explored and play with people that you genuinely enjoy playing and carousing with. I also recommend having a child, so you always have someone to play games with (or in my case, get owned by). Finally, drinking and playing games remains a blast and hysterical to listen to.

I expect to be playing video games with Rex's kids and grandkids!

Canti

There was a time in the early 90's when I would anxiously wake up before the sun even rose and sneak down to the basement where the NES and Sega Genesis were and play for awhile before school and on weekends get a head start on several hours of gaming. These were games I had already played through many times before and still had a level of enthusiasm for that I have long since forgotten. Even newly released games that I buy today may only get an hour or two of play at a time before I turn them off, even when I have a large chunk of free time and am enjoying them. I think a big reason for this is that I realize now better than when I was a kid that there are much better things to do with my time. For online multi-player games I still have a higher chance of playing for an extended period of time largely due to the interaction with other players but when it comes to single player games there is a huge difference in my past and present game habits. For single player games today there has to be a significantly compelling story or very impressive gameplay for me to even finish the game. For example, I dumped countless hours into Fallout 3 and at least 30 into Torchlight but at some point during both of these games I realized that either I didn't care what the plot was and had maxed out my character long before running out of things to do (Fallout 3) thus giving me little incentive to continue playing, or, I had both no idea OR interest what the plot was (Torchlight) and I was simply grinding through enemies to get slightly better equipment than what I already had so that I could get slightly better equipment than that and so on and so on. In short it wasn't fun it was addictive and in the end I had nothing to show for it other than a chunk of my life wasted. There will still be games I and many of the rest of you will enjoy playing for a long time but as others have said, as we get older our perspectives change and to some degree we become jaded which results in our experiences not quite living up to our memories. Maybe it boils down to the difference between when gaming WAS your life and when gaming IS a fraction of your life. Regardless there are some things that once lost you can't get back and I think this is one of them.

I think that's the longest post I ever put on IC, in celebration here's a cat eating a watermelon.

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CB

For me, like others have mentioned, it's about time investment. With two jobs and a family life, there simply isn't as much time for gaming as there was when I was in college. What this has mainly done is make me a lot more picky about what I play. Like Canti, I can't play a game simply because I want to have beaten it or whatever, anymore. I can only afford to spend some of my precious gaming time on it if it's a fun and engaging game (of course, I also play some games just to review them, but I consider that work (because it is)). The epiphany on this topic really came for me only about a year or so ago. I was playing Final Fantasy XIII, and I was like 50 hours in, having spent all of my freetime on it for over two months, and I suddenly realized that I wasn't having fun. I was playing FFXIII why? Because I'm a FF player. That was it. I was playing FFXIII due to simple franchise momentum, despite the fact that this particular game was very poorly designed. It really pained me to do so - I mean it was a real physical and emotional pain - but I made the choice to stop playing that game, and XIII became the first FF game that I didn't finish.

At any given time, I'm usually part way through a single-player game which has me engaged, and which I get to play in snippets of an hour or so when I finish work early or if the wife goes to bed before I do, but the gaming time which is most valuable to me is the social gaming, which only works for me if I set aside a specific schedule for it.

Every week, I look forward to Thursday and Sunday nights because those are my gaming nights. My wife knows in advance not to make any plans for us on those nights, nor to expect to be able to even talk to me because I will be gaming with my friends. If it weren't for that plan, I wouldn't be able to play games with my friends at all, because spontaneous "hey, are you guys free? Do you want to play a video game?" simply doesn't happen anymore now that everyone has families and jorbs.

Also: I'm not sure if it's adulthood or just changing tastes, but video games are always better with friends for me now. There are a lot of games that are simply too boring to play by myself (like Borderlands, for example), but which exist in a whole different world when played with friends. (Also, we're always on Skype when we play, which makes the experience 1000x better).