The More Things Change...
Lately I feel no passion while playing videogames. Gaming was such a huge part of my life for the vast majority of my life. Honestly until recently games were one of the biggest things that gave my life meaning. But over the past year or so, I feel no joy playing games, and feel like the energy I would invest in learning how to play a game would be much better spent in other ways.
Overwatch is my #1 game. I tell people, "I built my PC to play Overwatch" which is true. I spent over 2,200 hours playing TF2 and naturally was ecstatic for Overwatch to come out. When it was released I happily played it for months.
But like any modern game, Overwatch is a giant commitment and investment. Overwatch is a game which takes me DAYS to "warm up", in that a lot of the aim-based and muscle-memory-based movements in the game take time to get into the "flow". So if I want to play good games of Overwatch, I have to be playing consistently for days before everything starts clicking and I feel like I'm performing adequately. The flipside of this is, I can never boot up Overwatch cold and have an amazing game with no warm-up.
Over the past year or so (Overwatch was released in May, 2016) my gametime has been slowly decreasing. To the point that I play Overwatch once or twice a MONTH, for less than one hour each session. It's mostly when I'm high on marijuana that I feel the urge to play, and I have been high on weed most every time I've played since it was released.
This is the point where I acknowledge my drug use and say that, yes my increasing apathy towards games definitely has to do with the fact that I have been trying to cut back my use of drugs for the past few years as well. My drug use and game-playing are intimately related and two sides of the same coin, so entangled to each other that I used to call weed my "Overwatch fuel".
Smoking weed forces me to intensely focus on one thing, usually a video game, for hours or days or however long I choose to be high for. It's an issue. My last binge was a few weeks ago, when I was literally high for the better part of the week while playing Minecraft the whole time. Being high sure is good and productive for Minecraft, but destroys my body and makes me into an unproductive disaster irl.
So yeah, I've been trying to cut back/abstain/moderate my marijuana intake over the past couple of years. One of the biggest differences from 10 years ago when I stopped posting to LJ regularly and now is: 10 years ago was right around the time I started getting into drugs and smoking weed on the regular. Were drugs one of the reasons I stopped posting regularly? It's definitely crossed my mind. One factor out of many possibly, but they definitely have had a major impact on my life and pushed me more into isolation and away from connecting with people online and especially in real life. "Drugs replace people."
This is definitely something I will write more about because it's a major issue in my life. I didn't really expect to end up talking about this, but here we are! I often wonder if my disinterest in games has anything to do with my transition as well. Less competitiveness is certainly an effect, and I don't feel comfortable playing competitively online when I'm not bloodthirsty about winning. There are a lot of factors and aspects to this situation, and I will definitely revisit this topic in the near future!
Overwatch is my #1 game. I tell people, "I built my PC to play Overwatch" which is true. I spent over 2,200 hours playing TF2 and naturally was ecstatic for Overwatch to come out. When it was released I happily played it for months.
But like any modern game, Overwatch is a giant commitment and investment. Overwatch is a game which takes me DAYS to "warm up", in that a lot of the aim-based and muscle-memory-based movements in the game take time to get into the "flow". So if I want to play good games of Overwatch, I have to be playing consistently for days before everything starts clicking and I feel like I'm performing adequately. The flipside of this is, I can never boot up Overwatch cold and have an amazing game with no warm-up.
Over the past year or so (Overwatch was released in May, 2016) my gametime has been slowly decreasing. To the point that I play Overwatch once or twice a MONTH, for less than one hour each session. It's mostly when I'm high on marijuana that I feel the urge to play, and I have been high on weed most every time I've played since it was released.
This is the point where I acknowledge my drug use and say that, yes my increasing apathy towards games definitely has to do with the fact that I have been trying to cut back my use of drugs for the past few years as well. My drug use and game-playing are intimately related and two sides of the same coin, so entangled to each other that I used to call weed my "Overwatch fuel".
Smoking weed forces me to intensely focus on one thing, usually a video game, for hours or days or however long I choose to be high for. It's an issue. My last binge was a few weeks ago, when I was literally high for the better part of the week while playing Minecraft the whole time. Being high sure is good and productive for Minecraft, but destroys my body and makes me into an unproductive disaster irl.
So yeah, I've been trying to cut back/abstain/moderate my marijuana intake over the past couple of years. One of the biggest differences from 10 years ago when I stopped posting to LJ regularly and now is: 10 years ago was right around the time I started getting into drugs and smoking weed on the regular. Were drugs one of the reasons I stopped posting regularly? It's definitely crossed my mind. One factor out of many possibly, but they definitely have had a major impact on my life and pushed me more into isolation and away from connecting with people online and especially in real life. "Drugs replace people."
This is definitely something I will write more about because it's a major issue in my life. I didn't really expect to end up talking about this, but here we are! I often wonder if my disinterest in games has anything to do with my transition as well. Less competitiveness is certainly an effect, and I don't feel comfortable playing competitively online when I'm not bloodthirsty about winning. There are a lot of factors and aspects to this situation, and I will definitely revisit this topic in the near future!