i wonder why Gamer became a prominent identity, like, why did games become such a widespread and significant thing to base your identity around? when i was in high school i remember reading about adults who kinda slowly fell off of gaming and feeling like, existentially terrified at the idea of that, and here i am with enough rsi to keep me from playing a lot of games and trying desperately to reconnect with the world around me.
i guess it's just because it came around at just the right time? suburbs coalesced around 20-30 years before game consoles really became prominent household items, and people really, really needed to find something to replace the outside with now that it was being stroadified and cul-de-saced and homogenized. so there's this thing that you could interactively pour time into, instead of just passively consuming, and something that was so intensely sensory, and that often involves skill, and that's so easy to access. so a lot of people ended up collecting pokemon in games instead of like, stomping around wooded areas and looking at bugs or whatever.
and today we have people who play pokemon go in parks with a lot of interesting creatures they could be learning about instead, that will die if people don't care about them enough. and we have the escalation of gaming into an enjoyable activity into a skilled sport on a level that often optimizes all the fun out of the games, with frame-perfect rng-dependent skips, seeking the Bigger and the Better and the Faster. i love speedrunning, but my hands are damaged and they will not sustain the kind of practice that the hobby needs, and ultimately investing absurd amounts of time into singleplayer games is something I've outgrown now that I understand how to look outside of my house and see what's in the world, and now that I can't think of much else but to save what's still here.