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I think I am approaching the end game of video gaming.
I can scroll through Steam and GoG for hours while seeing nothing that slightly interests me. Every once and a while a great game comes and revolutionizes my experience with video games, but like riding a roller coaster its then hard to go back to the Farris wheel after and feel a rush, all games after are discounted on their novelty. The games that did that for me were the Pathologic "series" and Disco Elysium. Yesterday was a bit different, I went on a site called Legendsworld.com and they have a lot of old / almost lost media games. I spent a good couple of hours browsing very old games, downloading them and then trying to get them to work. Most were broken and corrupt. But it was fun.
It wasn't the act of playing the games themselves, most were clunky and hardly working even if they did run, it was mostly finding the hidden games that was fun. I was playing a meta game around video-games. But in all reality it was just novelty seeking behavior, which kind of worries me.
I want to enjoy games and get involved in their stories, like books and movies they are a great medium to explore. Meta gaming ruins that by making it a dopamine seeking outlet only.
I don't know how to solve this, I am thinking of two possible causes right now.
1. My threshold for novelty is too high, I've seen so many ideas and visual artistry that for something to seem interesting it really has to differentiate itself.
2. My dopamine receptors are fried, I can't just pick a game due to opportunity cost and I seek a greater hit of dopamine from the other options I have.
This does sadly extend past video games, I'm picky with books, movies, art and videos I consume. It's useful somewhat for avoiding Sturgeons Law but it has it's cost of making me become stuck in ruts sometimes. I think that somewhat ironically having heavy novelty seeking behavior is reducing my opportunity to experience novel things.
I'm putting this here as a "To Do" for my own thinking, hopefully solving this would help me experience better quality of life.
I spent a good couple of hours browsing very old games, downloading them and then trying to get them to work. Most were broken and corrupt. But it was fun.
Are you familiar with eXoDOS? It's approximately 100GB torrent of 7000 games for MSDOS, configured to run out of the box -- the torrent includes a few clones of DOSBox and similar software, each game already comes with a configuration that works, also manuals and maps, you just download the huge thing, start the UI and play.
I used to play computer games when I was younger; now I have less time to play, a... (read more)