I'm going through a gaming "doldrom" again at the moment

There was a time in my life that basically all I ever did was what my parents told me to do and then immediately following I would fire up whatever gaming console we had until they told me to stop playing it to go to bed. There were several occasions where I was caught out of bed after hours playing with the sound really low and got busted and was in trouble for not going to sleep.

The weekends, while many people in high school were running off to parties and getting into drugs, was a time to stay up all night gaming with a couple of other gaming-obsessed friends. I think my parents probably enjoyed this part of me because I was almost never in trouble in the typical teenager type way. I had a job... and the sole purpose of that job was to make more money to get moar games!

Gaming has become considerably more advanced since those 90's teenage days of mine and I also have considerably more money than I did as a teenager. I have plenty of free time, yet I find myself wanting to plop down and play a lot less frequently than I did years ago.

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_{these were the glory days to me, folks!}

At the moment I have a decent gaming laptop that can handle most modern games outside of the ones with crazy high system requirements, I have a Switch and I have a PS4. I have a ton of games on all of these various consoles, quite possibly hundreds of them. When the time comes and I have freetime I more often than not will decide to simply not play any of them though. I can't put my finger on exactly why that is but I have some suspicions. Many of these are going to seem like things I frequently complain about as well.

If I had to put my finger on why it is that I decide to just watch online videos or fire up a film instead of gaming I would blame it on these things

• Games are a lot more complicated now than I want them to be
• Many games are trying way too hard to tell a movie-like story rather than just letting me play
• We have entirely too much access to a wide variety of games at any time and therefore won't devote ourselves to any one title.

The last one there is something that I was talking about with a friend the other night. We both agreed that sometimes we will actually spend more time in the various online stores than we do actually playing the games that we purchased. They've done a really good job with these stores and made it extremely easy for you to just click and buy anything. When I was a kid, getting a game involved actually driving somewhere and carefully analyzing the game boxes before making a choice.

When I play a game that has a ton of dialogue, I will do one of two things for the most part: I will completely skip all of the story because I don't really care, or I will switch the game off and walk away from it because if I wanted to watch a movie, that is exactly what I would do. I can't remember the last story-driven game that I played where I was actually enthralled by the story.

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As far as games being too complicated is concerned: There is a reason why most of my favorite games over the past few years have been platformers that if they used more than 6 buttons at least 3 of them were not essential to simply playing the game. When I get involved in a game that uses every single damn button on the controller I am extremely aware of the fact that if I take a few days off - which I am all but certain I will do - I am going to return to a game that I have almost no idea how to play and once again, will switch it off for good.

All the above being true there are still days where if I have no obligations and go through the motion to actually start playing a game, I find that I will spend hours enjoying it almost without any complaints. It probably seems odd to complain about video games because I have a ton of them. These are definitely 1st world problems and I don't want to ever abandon gaming because it has been a part of my life for 30 years. I guess I'm just getting older and most of the titles that exist out there just don't really appeal to me anymore.

I call it a "doldrom" which is a word that I thought an author had made up as the name of a sad place for a book called The Phantom Tollbooth that I read when I was a kid. As it turns out the definition is "a period of stagnation or slump." That seems about right on the money.