An update on my life

[firebush03]

I’m glad to hear all is well with you, Alex. Thank you for sharing. Not sure if my two cents will be of any use, but just to touch briefly on the topic of “gaming burnout”: I speak as somebody who only enjoyed a very small handful of games for a big chunk of my life: I only played Skylanders from 2012 through 2016, I only played Zelda BotW & Mario Odyssey during 2017, and anything else (and I mean *anything* else) was agonizing to play… 3D Zelda was especially boring, 2D games felt like lesser versions of 3D, 3D Mario felt utterly awful to play in comparison to Odyssey, Splatoon didn’t click, RPGs were simply button mashers filled with text, etc. This was all the more exacerbated by serious mental health issues relating to an unfortunate side effect of contracting COVID during 2020– between the years 2019 and 2022, I only found two games that I genuinely enjoyed. And yet, here I am today with 3D Zelda & 3D Mario filling my all-time favorite games. With games as panned as Welcome Tour and DragXDrive sucking me in to everything they have to offer.

Here’s my pro-tip: If you need motivation to play through an entire game, come up with a goal. For me, that goal was to finish my backlog, to build up my catalogue of gaming experiences, as well as to see if I could ever top my previous record in number of hours spent in a single game (Spoiler Alert: TotK blew my previous record out of the water).

Here’s my second pro-tip: If a game isn’t clicking with you, ask yourself why. Don’t look at the game with a judgmental lens, but look at yourself. What is it about your approach to the game that makes it click far less than with so many others? Once you understand the reason for other people’s appreciation, then you’ll struggle to find a game that doesn’t utterly suck you in.

Ultimately, however, what works for me may not work for others. It’s an unfortunate reality. However, if anything I say here is of any use, then that would make me all the more glad! Also important is to remember: No hobby will last for all eternity. Sometimes obsessions will come and go… I was once obsessed with Skylanders, but now that’s nothing more than a fun thing I glance at every now and again. Same goes for piano and french horn, for mathematics, for Pokémon, for… everything in my life! So, don’t be anxious when that day inevitably comes when you lose a lot of that passion. Accept it and move forward. If you want to keep the hobby, then fight for it. Otherwise, search for a new one. We worship not trinkets and gadgets, and whether the new Mario gives me a violent dopamine boost or not, the sun will still rise.

(And thus concludes prolly my longest, most thoughtful post on this site. Lol! I really hope something helped here— I know I’m only in my early-20s so its bold to speak so much “wisdom,” but never know what may be useful.)