Episode 2: Bad Gamer

i was always a gamer um and so i i specifically um you know i've played many different kinds of
games and i enjoy many kinds of different kinds of games but specifically i'm talking about video
games um you know growing up uh it was still a time the most of my childhood or a good portion
my childhood was you know pre-internet or at least pre-internet for the general household general
consumer um so you know i started of course with with things like my friends had nintendos and
at a certain point our household got a sega genesis um but that's not really the kind of gaming i'm
necessarily talking about i mean that plays into it but when i really sort of considered myself to
become a gamer gamer because early on i didn't have a nintendo of my own and i had friends who
would spend hours and hours and hours playing nintendo so they got very good at all that um
and by the time i kind of get into the console world you know it had somewhat passed me by
at least that's sort of how i thought about it um
but eventually uh what i was much more into was computers and computer gaming um
there were a lot of games and i should mention when i say i'm as a gamer um
i think there's at least a couple different classifications of gamers right there there are
gamers who play many different games so so a lot of the a lot of my friends a lot of people that i've
known over the years they they will pick up whatever the newest game is that has come out at least you
know when when it was a little bit more linear and easy to do that and they would play through it and
they would beat that game and then they would have the next game and so on and so forth i didn't really
do that so much i was more the guy that would i'd pick up a game maybe i would play it for a day
straight then kind of lose my attention span and never come around to beating it i didn't beat a
lot of games what i did instead was i kind of deep i would take deep dives into specific games
and really ultimately what did it was more online games or games that had some sort of multiplayer factor
or some sort of um uh you know mass what eventually became massively multiplayer online role-playing games
those kinds of things so for instance i i you know ultima online was one that i dove really deep into
for a long time um warcraft 3 and its expansion uh a real-time strategy game um big multiplayer component
played a lot of that um dragon realms was a text-based game again multiplayer role-playing
game sort of thing fantasy setting and for a while i i would really mostly focus on mmos uh when they
were you know a dime a dozen um you know i played many of them the ones that i kind of actually spent
time on were primarily ultima uh dragon realms um uh there was there was a warhammer one for a while
i really liked uh the first guild wars was really fun the diablos which were you know kind of
similar in a lot of ways um some other ones that a lot of people you know really got into like world
of warcraft wasn't really ever my thing i don't know i tried many many times to enjoy world of warcraft
it just never did for me um but anyway those are the kinds of things that i typically did
um they were fun they were multiplayer they were and particularly if you grew up like during the time
that i did where the internet and the web really came into fruition um you know at the general household
level this stuff was like a miracle right the ability to sit down at your computer and play a
multiplayer game with a friend um whether it was a competitive one or a cooperative one or whatever
seemed like magic at the time uh compared to the general experience which is you know you had them
over your house or you go over their house you'd sit down with two controllers and play you know a
cartridge game that once you turned it off it didn't save or anything you know this whole idea of
like these large worlds that you could save your state and all that kind of stuff anyway but then a
weird thing happened uh as i got into grad school and by the way i played heavily these types of
games all the way through high school and college and then i got into grad school um and kind of a
funny thing happened i sort of tapered off for a while now some of this was due to time constraints
i i was um when i went to grad school i i significantly shifted what i was doing uh in terms of a discipline
um and so i i really kind of dove into my grad school studies to kind of master that craft
to the best of my ability and i took on some contract work um uh to to get even you know more
well versed in it and so on and so forth so i didn't have a ton of time to play i didn't have time
all of a sudden to dive into big mmos and that kind of stuff the things that i really enjoyed
or if you're used to playing you know again i would play a lot of real-time strategy games but you
have to play a lot of reps with them to stay sharp and good so i just i kind of faded a little bit
and then as i kind of got out of grad school and i was you know doing other things with my life
um i kept trying to come back to gaming and sort of a funny thing happened it it all kind of coincided
with the times where where dlc and sort of more pay-to-win style gaming and you could no longer
just go out and either buy a 50 60 dollar game and get the full game you couldn't really do that
anymore and you couldn't really um just pay an easy monthly subscription like 10 bucks a month or
whatever and have full access to a game anymore you it was a lot of it was you know the crescendo
in micro transactions and all these things
and i feel like not just that but the gameplay suffered right um i think games became very very
grindy uh so you kind of had these big triple a console games that i know a lot of people really
enjoyed you know the and i know i'm jumping around in terms of timeline a lot here but but
things like red dead redemption and um you know other kind of bigger triple a games that people
really enjoy but that remember that was never really my style of gaming i liked these these more
multiplayer based um uh you know almost subscription role-playing style kind of things
and they just they sort of suffered over time they became grindy i even tried going back to some of
the greatest hits you know like i tried getting back into you know what would ultima online be like
these days or you know once again i gave some runs on like world of warcraft and it just it didn't feel
the same some of that magic was gone i think that was part of it but also i i do believe that some of
this gameplay has gotten worse um over time and i think that's a a shame and and one thing that was an
exception during all this period of time was there what there was a a couple year period of time
where i picked up and dove pretty hard into league of legends um and it's almost a mixture right of
the things i've described where it's a it has role almost role-playing game-esque aspects where you're
this character and loving mother of the course of the game it's also very much real-time strategy based
um so it was kind of a it almost worked perfectly for me firing a lot of cylinders but even that
when i first started playing it again yes it was a lot of microtransition stuff but it was very based
geared around it was simple you know if you wanted to buy aesthetic skin kind of stuff you would pay
with the premium currency that existed in the game other things you could kind of grind your way
through and pay for with gold if you wanted more characters or whatever i came back to that game
several years later after kind of stopped playing taking a hiatus for a while and it all shifted it was
also complicated so just getting into the interface it felt like a job um and i just wonder about these
things i wonder you know what kind of happened along the way was it was it that did the gaming really
change did i grow up and lose interest did i skip significant periods of time that it was just too late
to get back into it in a significant way i've done some mobile games too um for instance i got really
really into well let me start over here it's my opinion that gaming has gotten worse um that it is no
longer what is good for the gamer or what's fun for the gamer it's just about how much can you pull out
of them how addicted can you get them and then how much resources and money can you pull from it
um and an example of this would be i played a lot of um clash royale on mobile
really a interesting micro level easy to play fun to play deep gameplay little you know essentially
real-time strategy game that you can take on the go with you and all that as it started and ramped up
um you know again you could dump money into it but you didn't necessarily have to or if you dumped a
little bit of money into it you could kind of you know get what you needed to play the game
again very surprisingly deep gameplay for such a small little little mobile game that seems so
simple on its face but ultimately it went the same way it went the same direction of eventually
that world was able to or you know the the company sunk its teeth in to the player and and you get in
kind of a chokehold i know mixing metaphors but you you it's you get to a point where the the game is
so grindy to do it without paying exorbitant amounts of money um and i do mean exorbitant you you you
could know there was a period of time where if you paid 10 bucks a month it's kind of the old
subscription model you could pay 10 bucks a month you get a bunch of perks out of it it was kind of
this we monthly pass kind of thing um and that was fine you could really make a lot of progress in
your account and play a lot of great games and then that kind of went by the wayside and you could
no longer do that without spending extremely large amounts of money so i wonder and this is a question
for anyone out there um you know if you have an answer to this or suggestions get in touch
what's happened and am i in the wrong spot am i looking for for games in the wrong places you know
again what did i enjoy i enjoyed kind of role-playing aspects of games i enjoyed strategic components to
games i enjoyed multiplayer uh world open world with other people kinds of experiences but not ones that
i always feel like they're trying to take more from me um and not necessarily games that are just
designed to be nothing but dopamine dopamine systems right um that would mean to leave delivery systems
so what is the answer to this um have i just gotten am i just old and grumpy uh did did i miss
my chance my chance are the games actually worse uh are they somewhere else uh is indie games the way
to to find things um that's a whole world that i've barely explored um in part i don't know just because
there there seem to be so many of them um so yeah i would be curious to hear from anyone where one is
supposed to turn if they if they grew up thinking themselves as a gamer and then has suddenly found
that they have a very hard time within that ecosystem these days any similar experiences
out there uh please share i'd love to hear