This 2 year old video still comes to mind after I happened to recently read some topics over on /r/MMORPG (again, I am not a regular visitor of Reddit) where there are individuals (hopelessly) looking for “the one” MMO to call home that meets an unrealistic number of design objectives. IMHO, there will never be the end all MMO (except in crafted marketing PR campaigns that over promise, and then end up under delivering in actual implementation).
I have my own complaints about some of the titles that I play which I use this blog to occasionally vent about. But since I am also very aware of those issues, I focus on the parts that I do enjoy in-game and end up playing my own way (else there would be no point in continuing to play if the whole game play was unfun and unrewarding). That’s partially why I stopped playing a bunch of games including Diablo III, StarCraft II, MU Legend, Lost Ark (KR), ArcheAge. This is also why I consciously chose not to play an ever wider array of titles (especially in the MMORPG genre and those primarily designed heavily around cash shop mechanics like Black Desert Online for example).
Some folks however end up in this rut trying to find some game to get into or end up becoming the hardcore tryhard spending untold hours in front of their computer grinding away for that next upgrade. And then they jump onto some forum, Reddit, Discord chat to spend even more time (on their PC or phone) complaining about how terrible the game, the developer, the publisher is, but find themselves unable to tear themselves away from the parts of the game that drives them to this level of unhappiness.
Players should know the exercise by now; trying to do the equivalent of “jumping up and down, flailing arms around” on some community forum, Reddit, chat, etc normally falls upon “deaf ears”; especially true for publishers who are only publishing the title and don’t have direct development control. I myself have had to unfortunately deal with only a few incompetent publishers (like Trion Worlds and now En Masse Entertainment) to play those games that I enjoy/ed playing (as I’ve noted before, the latter wasn’t always that way; things just fell apart after the key original people left throughout 2016). If I were playng even more games, I would end up having to deal with even more incompetent publishers (thanks but no thanks).
Some of these folks end up unwittingly (and unfortunately) falling into the cycle in the above video. It’s why I personally chose to eschew most all of my social media accounts (deleting my Twitter account, deactivating Facebook/Instagram, deactivating Twitch (thus no ability to chat) and keeping the usage of others like Reddit and Discord as examples, to a bare minimum). I cannot stress how liberating it is to not feel the need to keep up with the pack (in-game or the social media treadmill).
I use this blog to just type out my stream of conscious thoughts just so that it doesn’t remain as (unimportant) clutter in my mind (the important clutter is what matters more). It also keeps me grounded because I can look back at older things I used to write (especially the stuff I used to re-post on the Blizzard forums) and wished I could’ve told myself back then to STFU. Blogging like this in this day and age can come across as being outdated when many cannot be bothered (i.e. tl;dr mentality) and prefer content to be visualized/spoken like the above video. I periodically upload game play to my YouTube channel BUT I do it without any production effort since that is not the objective. Sure, this all constitutes user generated content but it’s not stuff I take seriously or also place a high priority on.
My Devilian-Info site is a perfect example of something that has dropped to the bottom of the list (even though originally, I wanted to quickly populate it with all of the pertinent info strewn throughout this blog and elsewhere on my hard drive). There’s a point where I needed to weigh the extra amount of time I would need to spend sitting in front of my computer to go through that material versus pursuing a more productive/higher priority objective outside. My motivation level goes up whenever I get a comment from a former player on one of my Devilian videos (in the Memories of Devilian playlist) since I still have gigabytes more of video to still upload. But I’m also trying not to let that consume my time; I find that doing it little by little helps to keep all of the memories alive while also not diminishing it.
Games are meant to be fun/a form of entertainment. Yet, there is a segment of the player population out there who have turned it into something else. Some game designs and/or their monetization ends up turning some of them into a “side job” with the dailies routine where it reinforces some of the points mentioned in the above video. The point is that it is good to have a balance; to sometimes step away from the computer and to put that smartphone down; to disengage and disconnect from this always online world that we now live in. More importantly when it comes to games, to not fall into the trap of slaving away at the daily grind (for fear of falling behind and “losing” that battle to keep up).
