Good Morning Folks. Often times what you end up seeing here on my blog has at least started in some small part with some random comments here or there or on social media. Not that I expect anyone out there to be hanging on my ramblings, but if you follow me on Gamepad.club especially you might have seen the beginnings of this post. We are nearing the end of the year and there is something about that that ends up making me a bit introspective. This combined with a harmless comment that I read about something I wrote… has made me sort of evaluate what I am producing in the world. Truth be told… there are a lot of times I come across as an angry old man yelling at the clouds.
This is not the person I want to be, but I also feel like I am trapped in a pattern. My world is actually relatively small in truth. I have my wife, my cats, and my home… and then the handful of you out in the world who care enough about me to interact on a regular basis. This is not necessarily pity trip territory, because truth be told… it is the world I have wanted. Social interaction often drains me to the point of brittleness and working remotely for the last four years has been more good than bad. However, this small world also means that I have a bad habit of clinging to things a bit too harshly and placing my hopes and fears in external sources. I should in fact probably “touch grass” more often even though I have always thought that phrase was a bit too dismissive.
Anyways… I really miss the joyful exuberance I used to feel about gaming. I miss being able to feel wholly uncomplicated feelings about a brand-new game. Now everything is tinged with regret and bitterness and I am not sure I know a way to push past that. Either I end up comparing it to games that came before, or I deep dive too critically into the flaws and never end up talking about the positives. Then there is the problem with the social ramifications of gaming, for example, I probably would have enjoyed the Harry Potter open-world game, but refuse to give any more money to that franchise because it ultimately ends up supporting a vicious hatemonger. Nothing is simple anymore, and it feels like it can never be simple… at least not in the way that it used to be.
Maybe this is just a casualty of aging, and viewing the world through more jaded eyes. Maybe I am just suffering from depression that continues to grow while I refuse to do anything substantive about it. Maybe the games really have changed and I am no longer the target audience, or at least not in the same way that I used to be. Nostalgia is a terrible drug, because it makes us wallow in better times… that are themselves false afterimages of what the experience truly felt like in the moment. I can’t play Mass Effect for example without remembering how amazed I was the first time I played through it. That old game is nowhere near as rich as my brain makes it out to be, because I cannot separate the decades of fan service and good feelings towards Bioware from the game that is actually there.
What worries me is that I sometimes feel a sense of betrayal when it comes to a game. For example, I was legitimately angry at the way the story turned out in Diablo IV. Does the game deserve my ire? Probably not. It just wasn’t a good story, much in the way that there are a lot of completely mid movies out there that I seem to be able to consume just fine without getting angry at them. However Diablo as a franchise is a core part of my gaming soul. It was extremely important to me over the years and was a rock that I could lean on when I needed it, as a result, I get frustrated when it goes in directions that I think are poorly planned. I have almost thirty years’ worth of emotional weight being balanced on this franchise… and there is no way in hell it could ever live up to my expectations. Not to mention there is a fair amount of general bitterness that I feel towards Blizzard that is coloring my opinions.
I want to be a Boisterous Buffon Bouncing through life, finding magic in every moment. I want that so badly. I am legitimately jealous of folks who seem to be able to pull that off. I am sure that a lot of it is forced and often toxic positivity, but it still looks really damned appealing when I am wallowing in the depths of malaise at times. I do not want to be the downer that ruins an experience for someone else, because that is just meanspirited even if unintentional. There are a lot of times I hold my tongue and don’t speak… which only serves to cause the bile to well up whenever I do say something. Maybe I don’t come across as negative as I feel like I do, but I certainly feel like I am putting way more of that into the world than I want to. Gaming is supposed to bring us joy after all… not misery.
Why are all of these feelings rising to the surface right now? I was thoroughly disappointed in Diablo IV, which is a game that I waited for over a decade to arrive. At the end of this month, Dragon Age Veilguard releases, and I am deeply concerned that the game will not live up to my hopes. Dragon Age is another one of those really important franchises for me, and everything I see about this… gives me “seeking a different audience” vibes. I am going to play it because of course I have to play it. I did not necessarily love the direction that Inquisition went, but I still eventually came around to really enjoying the experience of playing it. A Games Journalist compared the game to the most recent God of War outing, which weirdly fills me with dread especially given that I actually genuinely enjoyed playing at least the first of the recent games. Similarly, I actually ended up really liking the Final Fantasy Seven Remake in spite of it completely changing the way that the mechanics worked.
Regardless of my attempts at rationalizing my fears away, the other part of my being is telling me that this is not the Bioware that I once loved. Truth be told NONE of these companies… are the company that they used to be. Bioware is a label that was bought and placed on top of an Electronic Arts studio, much in the same way that CompUSA and CircuitCity were once bought to create fake storefronts that all fed content from Tiger Direct. The era of “Studio Magic” is over for many of the names that we once clung to. There are smaller studios that are now taking the mantle of always churning out magic, but my brain still has a really hard time disconnecting decades worth of nostalgia from the reality that in many ways rampant capitalism has ruined these studios that I used to love. I can still feel good about supporting Larian, Supergiant Games, or Eleventh Hour Games… but it is hard to rewire the mental circuitry.
I am also super concerned that on the 15th of November Path of Exile II is going to drop and I won’t really like that either. I’ve spent more than enough on cosmetic items in the first game to likely automatically qualify for early access to the second game. It just feels like everything is “soullike” at the moment, and I am really ready for that design pattern to die in a fucking fire. That has been another growing frustration that makes me feel like I am no longer the target audience for many games. I am just not really interested in “challenge for challenge’s sake” experiences. That is not why I play video games or have ever played video games. I don’t play to prove out good I am at something… I play to escape reality for a while and to feel powerful when so often I feel completely powerless in my own reality.
Legitimately I have no clue why I sat down to write this today, other than occasionally I need to get something out of my head and the easiest way to do so is to commit it to the page. Folks usually end up attaching to one specific piece of what I said when I do one of these giant emotional vomit posts. I am fine… I will be fine as I always have been. I just miss being cheerful and joyous without any bitter fetters attached to it. I guess they call it baggage for a reason… because you carry it with you and can never seem to ever truly leave it behind.
I have been lucky to keep my feelings of awe and enjoyment alive with games and movies. Even the stuff others hate I usually find something enjoyable to them. I actually have more issues with items that everyone else seems to fawn over, because it always feels artificial to me… paradox right?
Now books…. god I feel like you do about gaming but toward books today.
Also… yes, Souls-like needs to die in a fire.
With regard to what can possibly be labelled “a loss of joy” for gaming, you are not alone. I have experienced it as well. It has also blighted my other great passion, films.
We live in an imperfect world and once you realise this, it does leech away some of our enjoyment of things when those imperfections impact upon things we enjoy. That is a legitimate concern but unfortunate state of affairs. However, I also think we compound this issue by over thinking things. For practical reasons we have to put limits on our ethical objections. If we don’t, we’ll all end up living in a cave, wearing moss but morally pure.
However, I have found a compromise and a workaround with my love of films. Sharing an experience is a great way to reinvigorate your passion for a hobby. I recently watched The Monster Squad, with my granddaughters and they loved. I know that film like the back of my hand but watching with them genuinely made it a new experience. I used to be involved with a film club and it was always a pleasure to see someone’s reaction to a classic film they had not seen before.
Perhaps a similar approach with gaming may be of use to you. Leaning into the social element with new players or just hanging out and being useful to newbies in the starter zone of an MMO. If you can’t immediately return to the upbeat mindset you use to have when playing games, may be being in the company of those who are still “wide eyed” and excited by it” will help.
My general feeling is that, when it comes to entertainment of all kinds, most things are quite good, at least in that there’s some enjoyment to be had from them. Some things are very good and a few exceptional but to expect anything to reach either of those heights is asking for disappointment. Just enjoy it if it comes and rely on most of the rest to be perfectly fine.
Based purely on what you tell us in your public persona, though, I wonder how much of this disappointment is down to age. Most people seem to hit a point where all the good stuff seems to be in the past. It’s pretty much expected behavior and it seems to start younger and younger all the time. It’s the people who carry on seeing new stuff as being as good or better than old stuff who get the funny looks, not those who say “It’s not like it was in my day”. As I think we all know, there are biological reasons why the experiences of youth have greater and longer-lasting impact than similar experiences later in life. It’s not always or even usually a matter of choice, It’s chemistry.
I don’t know if it’s possible or even advisable to attempt to override those reactions and feelings. If new stuff isn’t having the same impact then trying to convince yourself it does because you’d prefer it that way most likely isn’t going to work. And we’re all allowed not to like things and be disappointed by them and if we want to tell people about it that’s allowed too. I also think it’s worthwhile for older peopel to calibrate their reactions to media against those of people for whom this stuff is a lot fresher, from time time. Some things are just bad and everyone sees it. In my experience, though, not too many.
I find your thoughts about how newer games make one ‘feel’ are reflections of a lot of my own internal monologue. It definitely seems harder to just be ‘happy’ or excited about a game these days.
I’ve tried to write about it a few times on my blog e.g.: my thoughts regarding specific mechanics e.g. Souls-like games (Elden Ring) a while back, but didn’t really capture the feelings the way you did. I may be ‘inspired’ to write a spin-off from your post soonish.
I have always viewed your “outbursts” as having the force of a wet noodle…even if you consider yourself “raging”, it’s nowhere NEAR the kind of vitriol that we see on the Internet these days. In fact, I personally consider your going’s off on a game to be constructive, as you seem to point out flaws with specifics, even when they’re opinions, as opposed to the vague bitching most people do (“game bad”). You “criticize smart”, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing even if it feels bad. It’s more of the actual passion and less low-simmering rage that fuels the Internet.
I also feel like wanting to be the Always Happy person, and I know it’s difficult especially when we’re looking for something positive to say about something that means a lot to us, but which we can’t help but feel has let us down. It DOES take effort — sometimes a lot of effort — and in today’s day and age we will rarely know if it’s worthwhile because it can feel like we’re masking “the truth”, and people don’t tend to respond to positivity like they to do negativity. So why bother? Well, maybe it’s a case of “fake it till you make it”. Maybe trying to be upbeat, to counter each negative with a positive, can help us later on when we’d otherwise feel like nothing is working out the way we’d hoped. I dunno…I struggle with this as well, and I’m not a metal health professional XD