It seems that whenever you find a social media group centered around #gaming, it’ll only take a few days before you run into one of those posts, where you have a person asking if others have lost their passion for gaming too or if you can become too old for the hobby.
I’ve come across such posts quite often in which users seek validation in trying to determine whether others feel that they need motivation to #game too.
This fact has often made me ponder the question: what makes one lose interest in gaming?
For the longest time, this was a concept that I just failed to comprehend. Do people just all of a sudden wake up one day and decide that they no longer like gaming or is there a general problem within the hobby that has mustered these feelings in so many people?
I found after looking into this idea for a while that, as with everything, there’s probably multiple answers that include a wide range of factors including a person’s personality and age, but also a few trends with regards to just the general manner in which the gaming industry works, for example, how publishers sell their product to us and how we consume it.
Not Having Enough Time To Game
There’s never enough of it.
A lot of the users who create such posts often state that they used to be very interested in playing all types of games and getting lost in them, particularly open-world titles, but now simply could only find the #motivation to #play anything other than a few quick matches in popular multiplayer titles, such as Call of Duty, with friends.
Whenever I tend to hear something like this, I generally tend to think of the time aspect in people’s lives.
There’s no denying that there’s probably quite a few people out there who I wouldn’t say grew out of gaming (because that implies that the hobby is only for children), but rather that their priorities shifted and it made it harder to get into a game that requires several hours of one’s time.
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. (Credit: Activision)
I’ve always felt that one of the big reasons that titles such as #CallofDuty or #FIFA have such widespread appeal is that they really don’t demand too much from a person.
It’s rather easy to play FIFA for about twenty minutes a day and switch off and feel as if you’ve accomplished something, whereas the same could not really be said for a game such as #Fallout4.
It’s important to remember that your priorities can shift in terms of leisurely activities too and that sometimes you just don’t want to have to deal with the amount of time and work that it takes to get started in a title such as Fallout 4 as opposed to a title such as Titanfall 2 and there’s nothing wrong with that.
You’re always growing as a person and sometimes your desires change without you even really knowing it.
There Are Too Many Games On The Market
You want to play them all, but you’ll probably never get to play them all.
Most people who tend to post about growing bored with gaming often suggest that they have large game libraries that often consist of over 300 titles or so and that they cannot find anything to play.
This idea often reminds me of the Buridan’s donkey paradox, which states that if a donkey that is equally hungry and thirsty is stuck between a stack of hay and a pail of water, it would die of both hunger and thirst because it cannot decide between the two options.
In this case, you have so many games that you can play that you can’t really decide on what to play, so you rather just stick to what you’re already playing or don’t play anything at all.
Therein lies the problem. As you get older, you have funds to build the gaming library you’ve always wanted, but then it is often built of tens or hundreds of games that you either never really wanted but bought because they were cheap or encompass an experience that you already know or don’t really care for.
Fallout 4. (Credit: Bethesda)
I am not exempt from this action. I too have previously bought a load of titles that I wasn’t really all that interested in and then felt soon afterwards that, firstly, I needed to play them because I had now spent money on them, and then secondly, although somewhat a paradox, that I didn’t have anything to play.
People shouldn’t be forcing themselves to play certain games as gaming is a leisurely activity. You game to get away from the stresses of everyday life, not to work.
Quite a few people have spoken about the negative effect that producing so many games each year and then having them all go on sale relatively soon after release can have on the overall health of an industry.
Then the fact that, as previously mentioned, many of these games seem to be exactly the same thing is a pretty big problem as it makes you very apprehensive to remain active in this area because you think you’ve seen it all.
Assassin’s Creed: Unity map. (Credit: Ubisoft)
Evidence to this fact is that we already speak about a #Ubisoft–model when it comes to open-world games; the fact that you expect to find towers that open the visibility of certain areas of the map, collectibles to go fetch and a number of enemy outposts to destroy.
It is important to remember that this is not only a problem in the open-world genre due to the fact that you could find a familiarity problem with most games in most genres.
How Should We Address This Problem?
Despite having used some well-known tropes, I’d wager quite a bit in saying that one of the big reasons that #HorizonZeroDawn was so well received was the fact that it was a new IP; something that gamers hadn’t seen before and a lot of people have noted this fact.
Horizon Zero Dawn. (Credit: Guerrilla Games)
People are hungry for new experiences and if developers are to keep gamers interested they need to invest a lot more time in creating these new IPs or just more innovative experiences with already established IPs.
It is also important to remember that before you state that gaming was better when you were younger that when you’re a child or a teenager, you don’t have as much money to spend on gaming, so you tend to buy a few titles and focus on them and because you have a limited library, it is easy for all of them to feel new.
A person would also take a lot of care in trying to buy something that you knew you would like because you never knew when you’re going to get another game again.
At the end of the day, I think if you feel tired of gaming or that you’ve seen it all, perhaps, you should wait until something that seems new or entirely different is released and then play that and then decide whether you’ve outgrown the hobby or are just quite simply tired of the same things being released over and over again.
Have you ever felt tired of gaming? Do you think that people outgrow the hobby or that the industry is killing itself? Please share in the comments down below.
[Source: io9; GamesRadar]
