The Dark Age of video games
By: Jonathan Peng AKA Ching
For years, video games have been a source of entertainment, bringing excitement to people who play video games. However, as of recently, they just don't provide the amount of entertainment they used to. Many people no longer see something that was once great to them in the same light anymore. There are three main contributing factors to this. Firstly, what most people feel is that the new video games coming out don’t come anywhere close to games of the past. This issue has been getting talked about more than ever recently; TikTok and Youtube currently have a good amount of videos regarding this in Call of Duty games. Whether it be old clips of people doing the dumbest, coolest, and insane things in old games, or it could be just a video of a pre-game lobby all yelling at each other simply because someone spoke. These types of things don’t really happen anymore and, if they do, people get offended and end up muting and reporting you. This isn’t the game so many people have grown up playing. The saying, “Boys became men in pre-game lobbies,” is a saying that sticks close to my heart. You would get yelled at for being a squeaker and, because of this, it drove you to dominate the opposite team and rub in the fact that a squeaker, who is a younger player that has clearly not reached puberty yet, just caused a massacre on them. After that match, if anyone still had beef with you, Nuketown’s yellow and blue house windows is where you wound up. Guess what? This no longer happens; the cool and funny emblems, the videos made to Rick Roll gullible players, running after the bus in Transit as your friends laugh at you when you got left behind to be food for the tiny little goblin dudes, actually feeling connections with the characters in the story mode, and so many other things all no longer happen. Traditions have been lost to time that newer players and even the old players who remember the better times will never experience.
The second reason is because of burnout. Players have been...well, playing these games nonstop for years and so now doing that same exact thing just doesn’t hit as much as it used to. You launch a game and play for 30 minutes and then, after that, you close it and sit there wondering what other game you could play just to do it again. This process ends up with people sitting there and either staring at their screen or just calling it a day, turning off whatever they’re playing on, and doing something else. This is something I am very much experiencing. All of my friends can be playing the same game together and then, after two matches, I close the game, listen to music and just talk to them for the rest of the time. Again bringing up TikTok, I’ve been seeing people saying something along the lines of: “I spent $2000 on a PC just to stare at Discord and listen to music.” Discord is an app mostly used by PC players that lets you message or call friends and join voice chats with them. With that being said, the amount of relatability with this is uncanny. Sure, there are single player story games but, at the end of the day, there are only so many that will peak your interest or actually be really good. I’m talking about you CyberPunk. :|
Lastly, the reason behind all of this that many don’t want to hear about since it’s just something we don’t want to believe: we’re growing up. I believe it, while others could be in denial. The reason behind this is the fact that no one likes to no longer enjoy something that they once loved. Growing up to many is a scary thing. We leave behind the simple things childhood had brought us and head into adulthood. The realization of this is a pretty simple yet treacherous process as the fear of growing up is prevalent with 87% of Americans being affected by this, with 4-6% of the total population suffering from gerascophobia, which is this fear but on a higher, more intense scale caused by three of your limbic structures: the amygdala, septum-hippocampus, and hypothalamus-brain stem. Alright, that’s enough with the psychology lesson. It’s a fact that growing up is inevitable, nevertheless, people continue to have ties to their childhood. However, with aging there is maturing and, with that, there’s the chance that one can see things in a different light. That is what’s happening to many players, especially those in their late teens, because now they have to start focusing beyond what they’ve been fixated on for years. Something that has kept us entertained for years, played with our heart strings, and helped make special bonds and memories no longer giving us these things, instead giving us boredom and sometimes emptiness. It’s quite strange, is it not?
