Midlife Crisis, Part 4

I won't pretend that the following is some kind of revelation brought on by my somewhat recent decision to splurge on a shiny new computer. I've known it for a long time, and I've probably mentioned it before, but right now — at the beginning of a new year and the end of a string of posts regarding my PC-building experience and all the second-guessing involved — just seems like a pretty good time to bring it up.

Playing video games doesn't seem nearly as fun as it used to be.

And it's not just because I've grown up. It certainly does have something to do with my lack of free time as an actual adult who works for a living, but it's not a change of my own personality that makes it more difficult to sit back and enjoy what used to be incredibly entertaining. I mean, let's face it, I'm still a kid on the inside. I'm in my mid-20s but I have a blog about video games and I still think playing games (in moderation) is a perfectly good use of time. That alone, according to almost anyone, probably makes me a man-child in a man-man's body. I think I've grown up enough to convince people that I've grown up, but I'd still rather play a video game than read a newspaper, and I'd rather argue about video games than argue about politics. As far as I know, this isn't so abnormal for guys my age. Incidentally, I'm told I belong to an entire generation of man-children who don't know how to be real men — that I'm the product of the downfall of society and that it's probably the internet's fault — but that's a discussion for another day.

The problem isn't that I've grown out of video games. If I really had, there would be no problem at all and I wouldn't care enough to write this. The problem, in fact, is a bunch of problems.

A lot of my friends have grown out of video games, and I have fewer people with whom to enjoy my pastime of choice. Society as a whole thinks I should grow out of video games, so unless I work in the industry (which I do not), I can't openly express my enthusiasm for the medium without inviting all sorts of assumptions about my character (only some of which are true). Have I ever mentioned that I'm using a pseudonym? For the same reason I don't just go ahead and list "gaming" as a skill on my résumé, I don't really want potential employers to find this blog when they do a quick background check on me. It's both irrelevant and potentially damaging. So is most of what I've ever posted on Facebook, so I should really double-check my privacy settings or just delete my account.

Playing video games, in some ways, has become a pretty lonely activity, and it's not just because so many of my friends have left the party. It's also because I'm interested primarily in single-player games these days, and nobody wants to watch me play them, not that I expect them to. Oddly enough, in my youth I felt that video games were very much a spectator sport. Enjoying a new single-player game with my two brothers didn't necessarily involve taking turns, but those were the days when we had nothing better to do on a weekend than watch each other get mad at the final boss in some nearly impossible 2D sidescroller. People watching people play video games isn't actually such a weird thing — search for "Let's Play" on YouTube and see for yourself — but everyone I know who still has any interest in video games only seems to like massively multiplayer online stuff anyway. So screw me and my apparently bad taste, I guess.

To some extent, my trouble with maintaining an interest in any of the recent games I've played might also be a case of unrealistic expectations. In comparing today's games to those of my apparently idyllic childhood, the verdict is always "meh." Feelings of nostalgia make objectivity impossible and I have plenty of those feelings for video games I played when I was 10 years old.  Maybe I just think I'm having less fun because nothing can live up to that rose-tinted version of reality. It could also be that, having played so many games over the years, I'm less easily impressed. The first time I played a first-person shooter, it was really fantastic. After a hundred of them, it takes something really crazy to keep me interested.

This post probably wouldn't be complete if I didn't at least half-heartedly entertain the notion that games themselves are actually getting worse, but I think what's more important is that modern games are always made to cater to people who never played a game before. The depth I crave would probably alienate new players, and the mandatory tutorial levels that new players need are boring me.

All of these are contributing factors, but my lack of free time is by far the most significant. I work 40 to 50 hours a week doing something I don't enjoy, and when I get home it's hard to do anything but sleep. I spend the majority of my free time with my girlfriend, who doesn't care that I play video games but doesn't care to play them herself, so it's not something we can do together. When I do get some time alone to waste, it's rarely more than a couple of hours, and rarely can I find the motivation to start a new game when I'm on such a tight schedule. So I just end up browsing the web or loading a save in the middle of something I've already finished. Even on the weekends, the prospect of going back to work on Monday is so distracting that it's hard to enjoy anything at all. You know, I think I'm just depressed. This isn't helping to shrink my rapidly growing backlog of things I really want to play eventually.

Maybe part of me thought that buying a new PC would somehow fix all of this. I guess it has, at least a little, since there are more games that I can actually play and I'm excited about playing them. I have to admit, I've enjoyed replaying Crysis with the graphics turned up to crazy (even though this only gets me around 40 frames per second most of the time). But I haven't had the time or the patience to dive into L.A. Noire or Mirror's Edge or Dead Space, all of which are on my Steam account with only a few minutes logged. Maybe, one of these lazy Sundays, I'll have a chance to make some progress in one of them, and maybe the experience won't be ruined by thoughts of the impending Monday.