April 4, 2025
I've spent A lot of time playing games over the years, but as I've gotten older, I've been playing less video games and spending time with different hobbies and activities instead. Part of it is because I'm getting older and my interests are changing, but I also deliberately reduced my gaming because of the direction gaming has been heading in for years, if not decades, now.
Over time, games seem to have gotten longer and grindier, doing things such as artificially padding the time required to complete the game, or, in the case of multiplayer games, making things take really long to unlock or progress in the hopes that you will just spend real money to avoid the crazy grind. There are also some games (Mainly MMOs and other games where a lot of players are on the same map at once) where you need to basically build your own "society" in the game to make any real, meaningful progress on anything, and progressing as a solo player is basically impossible. If you enjoy that, that's awesome, I'm happy for you, but for me, I've realized it's way too easy to dump hundreds, even thousands of hours on something that doesn't actually benefit my real life.
Multiplayer PvP shooters are easily one of the biggest examples of this, as dying, whether that be to another player, an NPC, or the environment (e.g Fall damage) can set your progress back hours. Rust and Escape from Tarkov are the 2 big examples that pop into my head when I think about this. If you aren't careful, these games can eat up thousands of hours of your time. If you have difficulties managing your time like I do, I would recommend just not getting into them at all.
I already said it above, but you are more or less required to play these games in groups / guilds / outfits to make any real progress. Bringing friends along means that you are more likely to win PvP fights against other groups, and you can stomp on smaller groups and people playing alone. And if you die? Dying while playing in a group is less punishing, because your friends will just pick up your gear and give it back to you later.
I stopped playing both of those games because I was getting too old for that shit, and I wanted to learn skills like drawing and foreign languages instead. Spending 2 hours a day learning to control recoil for certain guns probably isn't something you're gonna look back at and feel proud of in 30 years.
These games aren't good for your financial health either. Since they are so demanding, both in time and hardware requirements, you're probably gonna feel pressure, from yourself and from the friends or group you're playing with, to spend a ton of money upgrading your machine. It's gonna be costly.
I mean, you don't have to listen to me, play them at your own risk. But if you have any self-respect, maybe do yourself and your wallet a favor and just stay away from these kinds of games. I quit the ones I mentioned 3+ years ago and looking back it was one of the best decisions I made for myself so far in the 2020s.