Healing For A Damaged Gaming Mind

2 September 2025

[A short personal essay about my experiences and current struggles with gaming. ~ 10 minute (~7.beat) read time + a couple minutes worth of memes if you click every hyperlink.]

It pains me to state it, but I'm not the gamer you think I am. With my longstanding history of regard for expansive, lengthy, detailed role-playing games, it is with much, heart-wrenching sorrow that I must come clean and confess that I have a problem...

I can't finish games anymore...

It's embarrassing, but it's true. Within the last handful of years, the number of games that I have began and finished is frankly dismal when compared to my supposed interest in and passion for these games. I've entered a vicious cycle of buying a game, downloading it, getting so very excited about playing it, launching it up, playing for a couple hours, and then... nothing. Perhaps, occasionally, I'll invest a good dozen hours into a new game, but eventually my time with any given game will come to a premature end. Contrary to how it may sound, the problem is not that I am becoming bored with the games when I play them, the truth couldn't be further from that. Every day that passes where I am not playing these games, a large portion of my thinking is clouded by the desire to continue one, if not all, of these games that have been involuntarily placed on the eternal back-burner to simmer; I am cursed to smell the taunting fragrance of these games forever, for the metaphorical meal shall never be ready to serve.

It's not every game that fails to capture my attention in these recent years, just most. I will forever have my eternal staple games that I believe I will rotate through until the day that I die. Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft, Morrowind, and Minecraft. I believe that I will continue to remain interested in these games until the day that I die. Beyond all of these experiences being massively-expansive, bordering on eternal, I feel like I can attribute my continued enjoyment of these games to the level of familiarity I have with them. These are games that I have collectively, and perhaps individually, logged thousands of hours in. I believe, with relative certainty, that I can always return to these games and have a great time because I am intimately familiar with these games on a deep level. I would hardly consider any of these games, save for Morrowind of course, to be peaks and pinnacles of gaming as a medium, but they are fun, and I know them so well, and it's always easy to slot into what I know well. To this day, I'd consider my preferred genre of game to be the "expansive, deep, super long role-playing game," a genre of which I've played and adored many, many, many titles, but today I can't help but feel that

I've forgotten how to enjoy the games I love.

I can't help but feel a sense of loss as I write this entry in my blog. With every big new RPG release, and with every reminder of the size of my backlog of games I already own, I feel a bigger void in my lived experience, where a beloved hobby of mine used to be. I've lost an important way to spend my free time, and a method of interacting with fiction that I find very important. My days feel emptier, less fun, even though I've not lost any games at all; in fact, I still play games pretty much daily. The games I occupy my time with recently are, probably, broadly considered more "fun" games, at least from a moment-to-moment gameplay perspective. Although they've always been in my rotation of frequently played games, recently fighting games, shooters, and general action games have been taking my attention. I'll play games that are universally revered for their gameplay systems and deep engaging movement or combat feel, but.. I can't help but feel like I'm having less fun than before. There are many aspects of a game, or any sort of media, that make it more fun to consume, make the experience into something more enjoyable even if it takes more immediate work to get into in the short term. This, especially in relation to the landscape of games, can and should be explored more thoroughly another time, and I intend to do so at some point. But, before that, I need to ask why I find myself having less fun with games now.

It's time for me to really sit and reflect on how I consume games.

If you were to ask me to give a direct answer, I would say that I'm a PC gamer. I've been mostly interested in interacting with games via PC since middle school. During that time, the games that most directly appealed to me were also games that were most easily accessible on PC. Team Fortress 2, The Elder Scrolls, Garry's Mod, and Minecraft defined my gaming experience for a good two, three years. I still had access to various PlayStation consoles thanks to my brother, and my 3DS was always close by, but those were definitely not my primary gaming experiences. I would occasionally spend a lot of time on consoles, but that was mainly for my borderline religious replaying of the Borderlands games.

My budding interest in JRPGs encouraged me to keep the PlayStation close, primarily due to Kindgom Hearts and the Final Fantasy series; Shin Megami Tensei did not find me until later, but with that also came the Persona series of spinoffs. Even after my near-entire transition to PC, the PlayStation remained by my side as the only thing powerful enough in the house to play Final Fantasy XIV. Because I was mostly on PC by the time that my big interest in role-playing games hit, I also turned to emulation to play a lot of the games I had missed out on. Over the years I would build my digital library on PC, and it became easier and easier to spend time playing games with the people I loved as communication technology transformed.

Discord, YouTube, and the Brainrotification of Media Consumption

When I first started playing PC games, it was mostly in a social manner. The games that I had a big interest in at the time were either multiplayer oriented or more fun in multiplayer. Minecraft historically is best played on a server. It was always more fun to team with your friends in Team Fortress 2 to coordinate ubercharge pushes and elaborate silly strategies that never really worked. Roaming the wilderness of Azeroth in World of Warcraft was much more productive with a full party, and you got to hang out with your friends!

For a while, it was Skype(<-Actually not a meme this time I promise) that everyone used to communicate, and it did its job just fine. It served as a fairly simple direct messaging and voice chat application for small groups and individuals, and it was powerful enough to get done what it needed to for our purposes. Over time we moved to Discord, and video encoding and internet speeds got faster and faster. Before we knew it, we could all stream our screens to each other in a Discord server. I could be in a server or call with three, four, five friends. We could all be sharing screens together, each independently doing our own thing while we watched our own screens with one eye and everyone else's screens with the other. This quickly became the normal way of hanging out with each other, the default, the standard status quo that made getting together to physically play a TTRPG or card game special.

Then, I went to college, leaving my hometown to do so. Now, this seven-way division of my attention became the only way I knew how to manage being with my old friends. A dangerous habit began to form; this began to be the normal way I'd do anything on the computer. When no one was around to talk to, I'd turn to something else to fill the silence and keep the pictures on my second monitor moving: YouTube. This was the death sentence for deeper level enjoyment of any game moving forward. I could never make time for just me and one piece of media. I had to be talking with someone, watching a show, movie, YouTube video, something! There had to be something in my ears and on my screen besides the thing I was actually doing, or else I just couldn't do it. I had effectively Reddit Story Time / Family Guy Funny Moments tiktok compilation'd my entire gaming experience for years, and it did exactly what everyone knows it would do: it ruined my attention span.

De-brainrotting My Life

I've known that mainstream popular social platforms are bad for my mental well-being for some time, and as a matter of fact I've already discussed it on this blog. I left the large ones ages ago in high school, but YouTube always stuck. "It's different" I'd tell myself, "This content is more thoughtfully created, more thought-provoking." I was mainly listening to the same kind of video-essay deep-dive content that most people today put on the TV to have something making motion and noise on their TV in the living room to make the house less dead. What I didn't think about was the fact that I was consuming the media irresponsibly.

I've probably had the hbomberguy Pathologic breakdown playing on my monitor for a number of hours to rival the playtime totals of actual games I enjoy. The background noise helped me to feel less alone, but noise is still noise. Noise makes it hard to think. Noise makes it hard to make decisions. Noise makes it hard to feel grounded in any current experience. You know what, why are you even playing this game with so much noise around, it's exhausting. You should just lay down and listen to the rest of this video, you can get back on the game afterwards and put a less attention-grabbing video on next time.

When I noticed this trend, I immediately tried to move away from YouTube. I took a cold-turkey, scorched earth approach to it. No more YouTube account, my curated subscription feed and algorithm straight down the drain. Though small relapses do happen, I am largely more conscious about my consumption of YouTube content. I will.. usually.. only go on the site for an express purpose, or as a sleep aide - just background noise to help me fall asleep. The transition was painful, it still is sometimes; to have to face the quietness, the emptiness, even while I'm actively doing something is much much much easier said than done, but most of the time I've got it. And recently, something interesting happened.

Oblivion

I am writing this blog entry on the first day of September, 2025. This year, a remaster of a game very dear to me okay I'm not going to pretend like it's not there in the section header, I played the remaster of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion this year. Although it launched blighted with today's typical AAA release trifecta - crashes, optimization oversights, and and bloated filesizes, oh my - it is still a product that I feel gives a faithful modern touch-up to Oblivion. Perhaps it isn't the most ground-breaking game, but it still has to be a recognizable remaster of Oblivion, and that it does well. I sat down at my desk early one morning with a singular goal in mind: I will finish the Thieves' Guild and main quest today. The game had been sitting in my library, installed since April, and I'm still on the same old character. Neither quest-line is particularly long, and I had the game for months, why hadn't I beaten it yet? I felt that something was wrong with me. I hadn't forgotten about the game, nor did I ever intend to give up on that character. The task just.. felt larger than I logically knew that it was. I sat down, cast aside Discord and YouTube, and opened up Oblivion. And then I opened UESP on my other monitor.

Optimization Anxiety - or, The Wiki Problem

I want to start the following segment of this blog post with a little bit of a disclaimer - I don't think the use of a wiki makes your play of a game illegitimate in any way, shape, or form. Nor do I think that wiki-games (We all know what a wiki-game is. Think about any game complex and large enough that it can't, or otherwise chooses not to, give you a lot of useful information within the game itself. Think old MMOs and roguelikes) are inherently bad. This is about a problem that I found with myself, and my personal use of wikis in my gaming experience. Wikis easily have the power to to ruin my fun with a game, to twist and corrupt and stretch an item-hoarder mentality over the entire experience of playing a game. I loaded up Oblivion, and with it UESP: The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages. UESP is a massive, extensive wiki detailing everything that anyone may need to know about any facet of an Elder Scrolls game, or the series at large.

What quest am I on? Better look that up. Okay, I'm only a few quests away from finishing up the Thieves' Guild. Where am I in the main quest? Oh look at that, this other quest takes me right where I need to go. While I go in there, I might as well buy this spell that would go with my guild. Well, I might not have enough money. Oh, there's a Varla Stone in this specific ruin, so I should grab it on the way. Etc. etc. etc...

This continues for a good hour, I plan the exact most optimal gameplay to approach the rest of the game, down to where I get my gold from and when. And then I start getting stressed. I have a task now, I better get moving! We're burning daylight! Now that I know what I need to do, why aren't I doing it? No time for exploration on the way, follow the marker on the compass dammit!

...It's just not fun. I start feeling bad about the game, bad about myself. I get mad at the game, and that anger gets redirected back to me. I close UESP, go for a little walk around, and come back to see my computer - Oblivion still running, second monitor empty. I sit down and play.

Am I Falling in Love Again?

I just play the game, I focus on the task at hand and what I want to do in this moment. I set small goals for myself, give myself time between tasks to look around and explore, maybe look up one or two things on the wiki for quick question answers. I let myself use the items I've been hoarding; the big macro-scale plan doesn't exist anymore so I should just use them when I need them. I just play the game, and I get hooked after like two hours. For the first time in years, I would say, my entire attention is locked onto a game. Nothing else to think about, no one else to listen to or talk to, just me and the game. Total immersion. I finish the game that day, having achieved maybe half of the stuff I had plotted out in my big master plan and much slower than anticipated. I enjoyed every second of it. In the absence of the normal distractions I habitually surround myself with, I just found myself and the game in mind. I'm still thinking about the last moments of that playthrough of Oblivion, quite fondly at that. Every time I beat a game like this, I always come out of it with a handful of new little appreciations. A quest I had never done before, a new little lore tidbit learned, or a fun combat style discovered, there's always something new to think about.

Near the end of the playthrough, I was in need of a little switch-up, something to keep it interesting for an all-day session. I flipped my PC around on my desk and plugged it into my TV, getting my wireless keyboard and mouse and sitting under the shitty little kotatsu I made for myself out of an old tabletop. My computer was far away from me and my phone was charging, and who wants to answer a text on the TV? It made me slow down my interactions with texts and Discord messages, helped me to pace myself for more natural gameplay breaks. It brought me back to feelings of playing something like Final Fantasy X on the PS2 for the first time. No fuss, no distractions, just me and the game. Sittin' down comfy, away from the desk, where I do icky work things. This is where I sit to do the fun stuff oh my god I understand console gamers now.

Maybe PC just isn't the way for me anymore?

Well, maybe that's not the best way to put it. I know I will continue to play on PC. I have a large PC library, a PC strong enough to play all of the games I currently find interesting, and PC is the most corporate-neutral gaming platform. For every console exclusive game, there's one that is just on one console plus PC. What I have a problem with is the habits I have associated with the PC way of playing games.

Why would I sit at my desk and play my big expansive RPG with the same keyboard and mouse that I'd do my taxes with? I think I want to explore playing on the TV more. Of course, some games will remain best played at the desk. Shooters and MMOs on a TV? With a controller? No way. But for everything else... it sounds kind of nice. No open Discord, yanking my attention away while I play. No YouTube video, no immediately accessible wiki. Just me, my games, and my thoughts.