Reasons I'm Still Blogging About CRPGs After 10 Years (2019)

personally i only play video games as an “escape”. what was shitty is that i was always just escaping something that had to be done by a certain time. it was my goto procrastination technique.

as i grew as a person, and spent less time lying and taking on too much, and more time on how i define me and what i actually care about, i quit playing most games.

but i didn’t stop the escapism totally, now i bike to escape the pressure i’ve put in myself to be my best. the biking helps me handle my problems as it gives me time to reflect.

frankly, if gaming gives you the space to decompress and reflect than it’s fundamentally a form of meditation, which is how i see my biking.

the real challenge is to figure out if you’re gaming to escape yourself or to explore yourself. if you’re doing it right, does it matter how you decompress?

I've also played for pure adrenaline sometimes - a bout of CounterStrike before my AM classes helped wake me up back at university, better than coffee, but not as good as finding a spider in the room.

There is also some chatter that gaming can be a form of self medication for ADHD and related disorders. I haven't tried getting a diagnosis, but it runs in my immediate family, and I definitely feel like I sometimes game for a bit to "get it out of my system" and settle my mind to focus on other things.

For example, Disco Elysium (depending on your choices) talks about genuine change and the fact that other people who've known you for a while might not accept it upon seeing you again. Other games help place you in scenarios where you can make moral choices and experience the consequences (besides the original Telltale games, I'm also thinking of entries from Choice of Games LLC, assuming interactive fiction counts as video games). There are also works of genuine art like Myst or the indie game The Little Red Lie.

Outside of enabling a unique approach to storytelling, certain games can also help grasp specific concepts (e.g. Kerbal Space Program, flight simulators), though typically it's better to study a subject directly than consider video games as work.

There are a number of scenes in the television series Halt and Catch Fire where video games are presented as an art form. Interestingly, a character who treats game development as an art form initially doesn't like Doom because it looks like mindless shooting at first (but I think she warms up with it, as gameplay with a friend lets her open up about a problem on her mind [1]), and she also later enjoys Mario (also primarily gameplay-driven). In real life, trying out a couple of single-player video games recommended by different people I've met have deepened my friendship with them, surprisingly more than what I thought.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Chance_(video_game)

[1] (Spoilers) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HIfq3xH0Mk