You Hear About Video Games?

I have run into an evocative conundrum.

There is a new College Football video game, and I would like to play it. My roommate and I both would. We are, at the moment, unable to do so, as the new game only runs on the newest PS5 and XBOX Series consoles, and we have only a lowly XBOX One S. This surprised and frustrated me initially – Who’s even had enough time to go out and buy a new one? Weren’t they only just released? You can’t expect players to have caught up this early on in a new console generation!

Then, of course, I looked it up to find out that the XBOX Series consoles first hit store shelves in November 2020. We’re nearly four years into the generation now. At four years into the original XBOX’s lifespan, we’d already moved on to the 360. The exclusivity is completely sensible on the part of Electronic Arts; I am the one who is mistaken.

That’s the real conundrum here, though – I am at a point in my life in which I not only haven’t yet bought into the newest generation of game consoles after nearly four years (considering that I bought an XBOX One within a year of its release with money from my first job out of college in the summer of 2014), but I haven’t really felt any exigence to procure one – I’m barely even aware of the details of their existence! Here I am, age 29, and only now have I any urge to plunk any cash down for a new one. Even that one isn’t strong enough to prompt me into action. The idea of shelling out something like $450 for a Series X (and I would want the Series X, I need a disc drive), plus $70 for the game, plus however much I’d need to pay per month for the online play capacity is tough one to stomach, especially considering that I can’t name any other existing game (and really struggle to imagine another one coming) that would justify the cash sink as an investment in my future gaming, either.

This is all so strange to say, given my history with gaming. I used to love video games. Video games were my primary interest. I went to college to try to major in journalism because I wanted to write about the industry. I used to keep spreadsheets of games I’d beaten every year. I used to keep ever-updating lists of my top ten games each year and then write lengthy articles about them at the end of the year. I used to have news outlets like GamesRadar, GiantBomb, USGamer, Waypoint, and Polygon all bookmarked on my browser’s home page, I used to listen to podcasts about gaming news every day, write release dates of new games in my planner, write reviews and video essays once I played them… and now I can’t honestly think of even a second AAA game that might tempt me to splurge on a new XBOX now that I have a full-time job and can sincerely afford one?

This doesn’t even really sadden me, either. I’m mostly just curious: What happened?

1. Time

I refer to time in a few senses. In a broad sense, time has passed and left me currently in a state in which I’m less interested in gaming. Bluntly – I have found other things that I prefer to do now. The ‘preference’ aspect of the whole phenomenon is probably the source of my curiosity here. I’m fine with the development! In other cases, when things I used to have absolutely held to the core of my personality (such as, in an ironic twist, college football) have left the forefront of my interest, I’ve spilled thousands of words complaining about it. In this situation, though, I think the development is a positive one.

Though it brought me joy, gaming also served as something of a crutch. Gaming, too often, was something I turned to as a time-killer, or something to fill a void. It wasn’t always so simply that (and I think I could call literally anything that I do an attempt to fill a void if read uncharitably enough) but I don’t miss the meandering, listless evenings I used to spend idly gaming with a YouTube video or Twitch stream on in the middle distance, running down the clock before bed. I never left those sessions feeling good about what I’d chosen to do with that evening.

I suppose that I can’t point to anyone who told me this, but I internalized this anxiety about how aging is supposed to dull our enjoyment of life, leave us cynical and irritated, but I just haven’t felt it come on. I’ve developed a sense of appreciation for the richness of this life that I couldn’t have found without the passage of time. I am frequently blown away by how much piqutes my curiosity, how much I’ve learned so far, how much I have left to experience and learn, and (before I get sidetracked here) how many amazing manners with which a person can spend an evening – there are walks to take, films to see, books to read, people to meet, sports to play, et cetera. I don’t have so many of those listless periods that I once did, and I’m not as prone as I once was to just killing time.

So, when I get to a more limited sense of time, the hours that I have free to spend on some sort of entertainment/art/media work, I find myself choosing other forms. I drift now towards film and literature, which also both have the benefit of constraints (i.e. they both end). I gravitate towards games that end as well, now, rather than the endless games I had once used to kill time.

2. Overexposure

I suppose that time could also contain this bit here, but I’ve already started down this path of numbered sub-sections and I risk part 1 becoming significantly larger than the remaining parts (thus rendering the remaining parts pointless), so it will take its own place for now. It is possible that my aversion to gaming is not a full-scale change in my personality, but rather a natural rebounding in response to a period of overexposure. It is no coincidence, I find, that my gaming exploits first started to feel stunted and effortful during the Summer of 2021.

When the various interwoven anguishes of COVID took a hold on me in the spring of 2020, I turned immediately to video games to cope. I probably spent more time gaming over that year between March 2020 and March 2021 than I had since the halcyon childhood summers. Even when I was actively studying and working, I came home to video games and basically video games alone. I was painfully affected by them, too. My year-end list features so much gratitude and sentiment, my critiques treating these games not as works of art but compatritos upon whom I’d leant in my lowest hours.

As things opened up over the course of 2021, I found myself less interested in games. I made a video that spring about a game called “Ski Sniper”, in which I basically scolded myself for being so taken by a game in which one snipes ski-jumpers, while never latching on to any of the high-prestige games of the time. I thought, at the time, that this reflected something wrong with me, but I now feel that it reflected a sense of burn-out that I’d developed from gaming itself. This burn-out persisted when I went to Canada in the fall of 2021, where I spent a lot of time and a good amount of money trying out various Switch games that I ultimately never really latched onto (the games that I remember playing the most during that time were Minnesota Fats: Pool Legend for the Sega Saturn and Dr. Mario 64 on the Switch N64 emulator).

The sensation I remember from the time was ardor – It felt like I was trying to force the proverbial square peg into the round hole, trying to find some video game that would speak to me the way that they had in 2020. Meanwhile, what I recall most affected me emotionally from that period were Bronte novels, Lemuria’s Get Better, and Bobby Wood’s header to knock Sporting KC out of the MLS playoffs.

I think I developed an reflexive recoil instinct to video games akin to what I get from cannabis and Twitter now. Perhaps College Football 25 will be my door back in.

3. Finances

This is blind nostalgia reflecting my ignorance of the reality of the inflation of the US Dollar over the past decades speaking, but my god does $70 feel like a lot of money to spend on a game to a man who grew up spending ~$40 for GameCube games back in the mid-2000s. I can afford that, but the whole endeavor adds up quite quickly. If I find a second game that I want to play someday, it’ll be another 70, then another, then another, and it feels like a whole can of worms to open up here. There is the less expensive XBOX Game Pass subscription option, but I actually had it for a period of time and found that I’d just devalue my choices from that abundance of options, downloading a sampler of games and never giving any of them a full shot.

I don’t know what the solution here is, unless we somehow find a way back to a situation in which games didn’t cost so much that they needed to be $70 each (plus however much extra the publisher can milk out of players in microtransactions down the line), but the financial situation is, at the very least, dissuasive.

4. Ephemera (Errata? Marginalia? The Zeitgeist? Is there a good word for “I don’t know where to look to learn about this stuff anymore”?)

Since I don’t really use social media anymore and I don’t really listen to podcasts anymore and most of the outlets to whom I used to turn for gaming news have either shuttered or are barely running in the forms that originally drew me to them, I don’t know where to go to learn about games anymore. I mean that sincerely – I don’t know where to look. I feel my eyes gravitating towards the same solution I’ve developed for every other information-related problem I’ve encountered in 2024: I need to buy a magazine.

From what I can tell, the English-language game magazine options have winnowed down to around four major options. There are two American publications (PC Gamer and Game Informer) and two British publications (Play and EDGE). I’ve also found two smaller, also-British, indie-focused magazines entitled Patch and Debug. I’m sure that there are others, but regardless, this reflects a gaming magazine industry that has fallen far from what it once was. There was a point in youth (sometime in ~2009) at which I had subscriptions to EGM, Nintendo Power, and Official XBOX Magazine all at once. Nintendo Power and EGM both cratered within a year of that, and I was left with just OXM, which probably foretold what ended up happening with the gaming magazine landscape.

Regardless, there’s much less analysis to paralyze me if I only have a few to choose from. I’m going to stand in front of a physical magazine rack at a Barnes and Noble this weekend, purchase a copy of whichever of these I find, and go from there. I’ll also purchase digital copies of the latest editions of Patch and Debug and then determine if I’m interested in physical subscriptions from there.

There is no virtue greater than ‘having a magazine’ to me at this stage in my life. They’re really not that expensive, either, and for the most part, I end up actually reading them when they come in the mail and I can hold them in my hands!

Denouement

I have worked out a sort of scheme to temporarily procure an XBOX Series console for the course of the football season, after which I imagine that my roommate and I will no longer be that interested in College Football 25. My sister bought an XBOX Series S in around 2021 (I think?) for one of the new Assassin’s Creed games, but once she finished that, it fell into disuse. She has agreed to lend it to us for the fall. My recompense for this kindness will consist of gratitude and a second controller.

Time will tell how gaming and I get along at this new intersection. But I am willing to try again.