Comment by andrenotgiant
16 hours ago
This got me thinking: Rewind 25 years, I can easily imagine 15 year-old me sinking DOZENS of hours into playing this "game". I remember I put much more time than that into a free game that came in a box of cereal[0].
Today, I loaded the site up and spend about 30 seconds on it before deciding "this is cool!" and moving on, probably never to return.
What changed? I guess it's a mix of: (A) How I value my time. (B) The bar for "what pulls me in" in terms of gaming. (C) Some other factor around me just having already burned enough hours on games.
I'm not really sure how much each factor contributes.
Opportunity cost and perspective. We've probably played enough games to know how the cycle goes; there's a little voice in our heads now telling us that it's all just a big pixel hunt and the next few hours will be more of the same (my interest in a game fades once I learn the meta). And then there's so many games these days... so the other question is why not play something more interesting or exciting?
> What changed?
Personally, I feel too guilty about everything else I'm not doing. (This results in me feeling maximal guilt and doing minimal anything at all.)
Ditto. its a bit sad. I miss not knowing about all the things i could be doing.
Same here. It's a very sad realization, and I'm envious of people who don't feel this way sometimes. Nice to have company in misery at least though.
That doesn’t sound healthy man. Unless that other thing you should’ve been doing is giving CPR or something then stop feeling guilty.
“Productivity” is not the end goal, you are allowed to play games in life. In fact, shouldn’t work be about enabling you to enjoy life?
I absolutely LOVED ChexQuest. It was fantastic. Just played it recently, in fact.
I was roaming around RE-PC in Seattle eons ago, and found an old CD of the game for $1. Snatched that sucker right up.
ChexQuest is so much better than it has any right to be. Loved it as a kid
Did you have access to as many games back then? Maybe the novelty is less for this game?
If I wanted to play a game like this I'd play Lonely Mountain: Downhill, which has waaay more content.
This particular site reminds me of The Messenger ( https://messenger.abeto.co/ ) which was on HN not too long ago.
If this is the sort of thing you like (or in your case, used to like), you will like The Messenger too, probably more.
I think it's in large part just having to do with us developing our frontal cortex and like impulse control. I would have probably gotten dopamine addicted to it 15 years ago, as well as wouldn't have some nagging back-of-mind thoughts about having to use my time to be converted into money to survive at that age.
It's called growing up
I dunno. I see many “grown ups” replacing video game time with just more time scrolling on their phones, or maybe on the TV watching YouTube or some streaming service.
I think playing (some) video games can be a bit better for your brain vs. the above alternatives. At least many of them require thought and/or coordination.
Again, there are exceptions, where they’re not much better than doom scrolling. But it’s not hard to find some that require some effort and thought.
That's me, 2 kids and no time to game. Yet find 2 hours to doomscroll twitter every day.
Your wonder and discovery phase is over.
I dunno; I'm 39 and just spent 50 hours in Arc Raiders, much of it in a state of wonder and discovery.
I think there's definitely a raising-the-bar effect here too.
You got older.