I, like many gamers, grew up playing Pokémon Red and Nintendo 64 and was obsessed with Nintendo products. I graduated to a PS2 and PS3 and became super into Metal Gear Solid and Call of Duty and Fallout. Also spent a ton of time with the Guitar Hero series. I loved the escape gaming brought me and it genuinely helped me relax.

Fast forward a few years and I hadn’t really played a video game between the years of like 2011-2017. College, moving cross country and busyness of life kept me from gaming. Finally in 2017, I bought a Switch and Breath of the Wild and felt the same magical feeling I remember when I first started playing Ocarina of Time, or the first time I booted up Metroid Prime, or Metal Gear Solid 4. I started to get into online gaming and made a lot of friends. I played my Switch frequently for a few years.

During the beginning of COVID lockdowns, I turned more to reading than gaming and my Switch gathered lots of dust. I ultimately ended up buying an Xbox Series S when it was announced because I’d never owned an Xbox system and Game Pass really intrigued me. I went through a phase of being very into Destiny 2, Halo, Gears of War, Forza Horizon…a bunch of games I had never played before.

Then, a divorce, a new job change, another cross country move brought new levels of stress to my life. I lacked an attention span strong enough to focus on a video game. FPS’s seemed boring, online games couldn’t keep my attention long enough to get through a match, and eventually I’d just leave a game on the pause menu while I messed around mindlessly on my phone. Gaming wasn’t even a way for me to decompress anymore, it seemed more like a chore I was procrastinating—which sucks.

I’ve fallen deeper into this lately, as more life changes have come along. I work a stressful job with long hours. I’m now a stepparent to two young boys. The little free time I have I spend walking the dog, reading, and trying to just let my mind settle and decompress. Let alone, if I try to turn the Xbox on or have the Switch on my lap, it turns into a whole event where the kids want to sit and watch and participate and ask tons of questions (which is fine, but sometimes I just want to do something by myself for me!)

I miss the time of my youth where gaming was a relief and a release for me. I miss how I felt when I first got a Switch and felt so excited and so nostalgic and reinvigorated and looked forward to playing a game! Now…I feel like I can’t even consider myself a gamer.

So. That’s a long winded way to ask if anyone else has gone through similar ruts, or fallen away from gaming, and if so, what games helped you get that spark back? What games brought you back to that nostalgic feeling you had when you first got into gaming? What games help you decompress after a long day? What games have you recently become obsessed with in such a way that you look forward to playing them and are always thinking about them?

I want to get back into gaming. I want to feel the magic again.

  • @variants_of_concern
    1•1 year ago

    for me I turned to game hosting as a hobby, I really liked Minecraft when I first learned about it and later on I wanted to relive that time when I used to soak hours into my worlds, but now I was an adult so I could just never stick to playing for so long, I setup a realm to be able to have people join my world and they can build alongside me in the world and whenever I could log on Id see their progress. well that continued until I had my own server at home and I started to learn how to host and networking and honestly I dont really play many games except from time to time when something just draws me in but my daily hobby is checking, updating, and recruiting for my servers or media stuff. thinking of hosting my own lemmy instance for example.

    I think what Im trying to say really is that you can look for other hobbies to fill your time, then when you get back to games you might find one that feels great and you can lose yourself again, for me that was the latest pokemon game violet, I bought it because I heard about the raids thing and thought that would be fun, and was kind of blown away with how much it has changed from when I was playing on game boy or 3ds so it led me to try and complete my pokedex. similarly I used to be into call of duty a lot back in highschool but really stopped enjoying them after cod4 and just didnt pay attention to cods anymore but my buddy mentioned to me one day about modern warfare and how infinityward was making it a come back so I bought it and got hooked, soaked in some hours to actually get good at aiming since moving from a console to pc and had a blast, but now im burnt out of shooters again so the newer cods came out and Im completely uninterested