I think you’ll come to realize that it isn’t your attention span but rather the amount of mental energy you have left after working a 9 to 5 for 5 days a week
I know I’ve been playing BG3 recently and I’m struggling a bit with the mental energy required to play it after work. It’s something that really requires full attention for a long period of time and a lot of days I’d rather just do something simpler.
That’s definitely a large aspect for me. But, another large part is that the games just seem to be less fun. Online play has gotten so competitive that half the time people just rage quit, and single player games have just become grind machines with pay to skip options.
No, I’m not going to spend my limited free time getting a virtual job gathering wolf pelts. No, I’m not going to give you real money to avoid being virtually employed by an NPC.
I feel like game mechanics that were originally designed to immerse you into the game are now just being used to pad the game time. I won’t even buy a game anymore unless I can mod it. I refuse to spend extra hours of my time just because the only realistic aspect of the game is a limited inventory.
Those kind of games exist, but so does every other kind. And you aren’t forced to play only new games. Literally every game ever is available for you to play. Every person that says stuff like you seem like you think the only games available are the most known and most recent AAA games. It’s like only going to the most recently opened restaurants in your area, especially chain brand ones, and complaining about you not liking the food and then deciding that all food is like that.
When they want to whine and moan about how confusing technology is/has gotten and how much they hate it instead of just explaining the difficulty and what they might have tried to resolve it?
Yeah wish I got paid like a therapist for those. They’d get real succinct real fast lol.
I told people I love helping people but many of my “clients” wanted to score immediate points by coming to the “computer guy” to rant about how they hate technology for the next hour.
Imagine how that would go over at other professions. “This thing you work on and would be willing to explain if I’d listen for a second? I hate it. Let me tell you why. Please help when I’m finally out of breath thanks.”
I’m sure the vet or a plumber would love this. Your mechanic especially. /s
And the angel of the lord came unto me Snatching me up from my place of slumber And took me on high and higher still Until we moved to the spaces betwixt the air itself And he brought me into a vast farmlands of our own Midwest And as we descended cries of impending doom rose from the soil One thousand nay a million voices full of fear And terror possessed me then And I begged Angel of the Lord what are these tortured screams? And the angel said unto me These are the cries of the carrots, the cries of the carrots! You see, Reverend Maynard Tomorrow is harvest day and to them it is the holocaust And I sprang from my slumber drenched in sweat Like the tears of one million terrified brothers and roared "Hear me now, I have seen the light! They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen? Can I get a hallelujah? Thank you Jesus
You just gotta find the right game. I discovered Satisfactory last year and had to uninstall it after a few eeks because I was staying up till 2am playing. I am 40.
I feel the same way about Baldurs Gate 3, I’m only pushing 30 but after playing for less than 20 minutes I had a mini pre-intervention with myself like, “okay listen up you geek, remember staying up until 4am every night and surviving on popcorn chicken and coffee isn’t sustainable”
Isn’t it less fun and more preying on the addictive aspects of gaming?
It’s kinda like life Sims, ala Harvest Moon. Give just enough time to finish out your day. Extend the need to progress by fluffing out interactions. Make there be lots of little progression increments.
It’s less good game and more preying on dopamine routines. m.youtube.com/watch?v=1Yb5CINrC5EI get games have similar feel good spikes. Like loot/number simulators which are mostly idle games with more effort for how easy they are. But min/Max Effiency games like many games that have day/night stamina cycles are just keying in on that dopamine rush on a filled day, which doesn’t feel different than loot box games in the end. My time at Sandrock was my last one that felt great for a bit then you realize so much is pointless fluff gated by time dumps for no reason than to increase their playtime metrics.
I don’t make new playlists to split by genre, I do it so the shuffle will actually fucking work. I don’t know what dogshit algorithms Youtube/Spotify employ, but for any playlist over 100 songs the “shuffler” will typically just go through the same ~20 songs and expect you to not notice. I just want a different order!
Anyway now I have like 40 playlists with 20 songs each.
Apparently back in the covered wagon days when shuffle features were truly random, the listener would occasionally be burdened by hearing two songs by the same artist in a row. Literally no one complained about this, so of course upper management decided that this must be “fixed” immediately, so that’s what led to shuffle features becoming noticeably worse than when they were simply random, which is all anyone ever wanted them to be.
Actually, and I don’t mean to be that guy, but people did complain about it.
True random means that you could end up with songs by the same artist being played four or five times in a row, which makes people think it’s not random at all. Humans are really bad at understanding randomness, so a little help to make it feel more random improves satisfaction.
But at this point, it’s gone too far and I’m almost certain that shuffling involves always playing the most popular songs by an artist first, then random covers and remixes, then the back-catalog of works.
On a side note, I wish I could exclude remixes and covers when shuffling through an artist’s stuff.
Not all of us. I can’t imagine not understanding that if something’s random, there’s a possibility that something like playing the same artist five times in a row might happen. It’s cute when that happens, it’s a thing that should be possible and one of the things that was so much fun about shuffle.
I don’t want to be that guy either, but do you have a source showing that people really did complain about this? I’ve heard it said so many times that they did, but I don’t believe it. I think it’s just an excuse for big corporations like Spotify and Apple to manipulate algorithms to deliberately promote certain artists. I don’t believe it was ever well intentioned, and I resent that there’s no feature for people who want “shuffle” to work like it should work – in a completely random fashion. Or at least give us the option. The fact that there’s not even a randomization option at all should make clear that this was not development that was done in good faith or for the benefit of the listener. They actually removed a feature in order to promote their corporate crap.
It’s so obvious that Spotify is promoting certain artists. As soon as I launch the app, it’s always the same shit on the front page. At this point, I could pretty well predict what major-label crap is in all those “recommended” playlists they create for me. It’s so bad. Honestly, if it weren’t so damn inconvenient to do so, I’d just rip songs from the CDs I buy from independent labels and put them on my phone. I’m pretty sure there are some apps that have a genuinely random shuffle. Just got to find one.
Spotify themselves got that feedback that their truly random shuffle didn’t feel random, so they changed it to an algorithm. And this is from 2014 when they made the switch, so they were only just diving into algorithmic promotion.
I don’t disagree that Spotify now promotes certain artists and has really messed with their shuffle algorithms, but they left the true random behind because people complained about it.
All I want is shuffle not to repeat until I’ve heard (or skipped) every song.
I mean really what they should do is provide some degree of control over the shuffle parameters… But hey ho, back to listen to whatever Spotify thinks is my favourite song.
(disclaimer: I didn’t make this meme, but I do share the sentiment of rapidly losing focus/mental energy when gaming now.)
Favorite of all time? The SNES. It felt like the peak of 2d graphics before the slate got wiped clean for 3d, so we saw a ton of great games from devs that had been playing/creating 2d games for decades.
Favorite currently? PC. I have a switch, steam deck, and PS5 as well, but 99% of my playtime is on PC.
I was just saying this about the SNES to my SO last night, funny enough. GBA almost matches it, and for largely the same reason: experienced 2d devs, putting out their last hurrahs before the transition to ugly young 3d
Exactly! And don’t get me wrong, there are a ton of great indie 2d games out there now, but back in the SNES days, these were THE devs. You can tell the difference in polish from having been made by the biggest and best studios.
I had to go back and read up on the early history of video games. SNES came out in 1991, and yeah - looking at arcade games, Computer Space came out in 1971.
Oh yeah, it all started with the arcades. There was a whole culture attached to it, and they were very popular.
I think it’s fascinating to learn about how the developers figured out how to do things back then, the limitations, scaling/distribution, and then the rapid arms race between customers and devs to make games harder and harder to beat. There was an excellent documentary about this on Netflix a few years ago, but I can’t remember the name off the top of my head.
The last time they mentioned his age it was 38/39. They keep changing it but keeping him and Marge in their 30s.
Honestly I wish they would age everyone up a year every decade. If they had done that we would be seeing the antics of a 13 year old Bart now and I think that could start with some really interesting character development instead of keeping him forever a 10 year old.
If you want your mind blown when Simpsons started Marge and Homer were boomers, then Gen X and now they’re millennials. Bart, Lisa and Maggie started out as Gen X (underachiever and proud of it) then millennials, then gen z, and now they’re Gen alpha.
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