My windmill to tilt at as of late has been the increasingly confused perspectives I have on video games. I feel utterly alienated in current era from the pulls and draws that are supposed to be entertaining. In a conversation I had with a friend a week or so ago I said that I wish that the industry's releases appealed to me even 1 percent more than they do currently. I am not entitled to games being more my thing. But if you compare the amount of games that have come out and how popular they are to the games that have truly spoken to me the difference would be quite vast. One strut of modern gaming that alienates me is the desire to make time spent gaming feel "productive". Dailies, weeklies, time gated content, and all those things that are honed to hook into you and get you to feel like you have notched out part of your day in a satisfying way by having done them. There is something very insipid and insulting in the way that games will present a rotating board of boxes to tick that in no way challenge the player's expectations or give way to novel experiences. Go do this event, kill x amount of y in z, and all these other ho hum cookie cutter content that is attended to because it spits out a resource or currency. Games love to exploit that feeling of having earned something. But those tired loops when made naked to the player get to a point wherein they are sleep walked through. There should be some degree of intention when gaming. Not to say that one must be locked in 100 percent at all times, but just going through the motions is what leads to "content brain" and a lack of critical analysis (gamers and their lack of backbone leading to their perpetual exploitation is a post in the works). Relaxation and intention are not mutually exclusive. We dismember one of the things that makes the joy of wasting time with a game when we tune out like that, focus. No amount of in game rewards, cheevos, or titles can match the feeling of slotting into a game and it capturing your attention completely. A common refrain against being more selective with your taste and focus is that people just want to relax. But don't you relax when you commit your attention to a book or movie that engrosses you? Why should a game that rewards your focus without using disingenuous productivity hacks be any different.

Playing videogames is pointless. It is a waste of time. That is a beautiful thing. Feeling an urge to validate that wasted time through laurels just varnishes the whole endeavor in an unhealthy extrinsic cycle of validation.

(I will be posting more, micro posts here but will only send out email alerts for ones I think are important. Some of the micro stuff might be little LPs of games I am playing, things I am working on for TTRPGs, or other odds and sods. Happy New Year!)