I can't play games right now

I have reached a sad point in my life: I now spend more time reading about video games than actually playing them. This has been a gradual process that will only intensify over time until I am so removed from anything gaming that I will not even read about games.

This upsets me.

Video games have been a part of my life, like so many others, for my entire life. Weekends were spent playing a single shitty game that my siblings and I rented, pouring hours upon hours of time into our NES and adopting the heroin addict schedule of wake, play, eat, play, sleep, play--only in this case the heroin didn't fill our lives with delicious sadness and dead babies. The point is, games used to be all I would do.

Then school happened, and for a time my interest in gaming was only strengthened. There was a time in my primary education when the entire social hierarchy of my school was determined by who played what games and how well. We swapped games, got high scores, beat hard parts, discovered glitches, traded codes, lied about exploits, and drew characters in class when we were supposed to be learning Canadian history or something. It was the most popular I've ever been in my life. But times change, and as most of my friends turned their backs on gaming for women or heroin, my interest would not subside. I knew, that what I was taking part in was different than anything else in the world. The people who didn't play anymore: they didn't understand in the same way that I did.

There was something ethereal about controlling a sprite onscreen--about the plight of my electronic avatar. Good or bad, I would play the game and always have empathy for my onscreen self, whether I was Super Mario, Leonardo, or a monster-killing knight. It wasn't just escapism for me--at least not purely, since I always enjoyed life and school and the summer when my mother would pack up all the video games and put them in the closet where I couldn't get to them apparently (whatever, that shit is dark in there). Gaming gave me a view into a world that was like my own, but followed different rules: it was magic and different. And now, after a lifetime of games, I think that magic is wearing off.

Want to know how to destroy a good thing? Find out everything you can about it, disassemble it and figure out how it works. That way, when the magic happens, you can know that it isn't magic, but actually quite logical and boring. When I turn on a console today, I struggle with an overwhelming indifference. Part of this I blame on the inherent structuring of modern gaming (I like shooting things, too) but somehow I feel like I'm just putting time in and going through the motions of actually caring about the missions I play and the flags I trigger.

I'm not just impossibly picky, however, since I enjoy games I played as a kid almost more now. Nostalgia aside, there's still something beautiful about controlling a sprite that only knows the flat world of two-dimensional gameplay. For me, it's all about immersion in what I'm doing, and the abstract premise of a two-dimensional game is always inherently more appealing than a three-dimensional one. I suspect this is because three-dimensions are closer to the realworld, which has rules, values, and biases, while two dimensions are rarely exclusively explored in the realworld, except in the form of art (and of course commercial mediation, which applies art); therefore, two-dimensional games invoke a greater sense of the essence of a video game. Three-dimensional games have to work harder to immerse the player, otherwise the experience is forced and hollow for no reason other than the player cannot fully suspend their disbelief. And let's face it, sitting in front of a monitor, holding a remote controller and pressing buttons to trigger flags or achieve specific values in a programme isn't exactly the fast-action bloody shootout that it's advertised to be.