The bittersweet nostalgia of "Video Games"

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/27/the-bittersweet-nostalgia-of-video-games.html

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I’m not crying… shut up. you’re crying.

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boing boing been doing this a lot lately

Never mind that this is the year I’m trying to not buy more games and get though my backlog of games that I’ve A) Never played, B) Never Finished and C) Didn’t get the completeness I wanted.
It’s a ridiculous list, several were in the video.
Even working at home, I’m not getting the time to do this and it may become and multi-year project :expressionless:

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The sad thing is I knew what pretty much every single game on there was.

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to also choose moments within those games that had a particular significance to us while also going hand in hand with the song

That worked. The Tetris segment where the long bar dropped down got me right in the feels.

Yep.

I’m pretty sure I’m at the point where my backlog could last me the rest of my life - if I never buy another game, I’ll still have some unplayed games when I die.

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I used to wonder what year it was, when the total cinema output of the world exceeded what a single person could watch, if they did nothing but watch movies. And then I wondered how long after that, the same point was reached for TV. But I never thought about that in terms of videogames until your comment.

It’s a little scary, to live in a time when living in reality is considered optional.

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Yeah, if Ready Player One had focused more on the difference between real life and a video game, I would have a lot more attention for it.

This hit me square in the feels. It seems crying is harder to do during covid. But things like this help.

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It’s doubly bad with video games, as they’ve long been designed to be as long a play experience as possible. It usually takes longer to play even the shortest games than watch a movie, and most games take longer to complete than reading a book or watching a whole season of a tv show.

Ever since the bars to development and distribution disappeared (with free engines like Unity, etc. and Steam opening up to all comers), it’s become beyond ridiculous - we’re now at the point where more games are released than anyone can keep track of, much less install, much less actually play. There’s something like 20-odd games being released just on Steam every day (which pretty well covers PC and console releases, though some never make it to Steam). That’s bad enough, but if we add in phone games, there’s about 500 games a day just being released on Apple’s store. (Although granted, with phone games, a significant number are absolute garbage that no one spent any time developing, much less will anyone spend any time playing.)

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Forgive my truncating your remarks, fellow dreamer, but I have bad news… you’re NEVER going to finish Ghosts’n’Goblins, even if you live to be a million :dagger: :fire:

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Good news, that one isn’t on my list :relieved:… YET!

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Writing v.games is fun. Playing them is boring. Yawn.

Beautifully composed. :cry:

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artwork03

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