Few days ago I tried to play Terraria for the first time with my boyfriend who has 500 hours in the game and I thought maybe playing together over voice chat would make me more engaged in playing a video game but all it really did was make my rapid burnout and loss of interest feel guilt-ridden because if I told him I wasn't having fun and was extremely bored, that feeling I seem to develop for every video game I try out would now become a personal insult that would make my boyfriend feel bad.
So I was kind of right. I did end up playing the game for longer than I otherwise would have. But that was only because long after I stopped caring about the game, I just didn't wanna disappoint my bf who was clearly having fun showing me around the world and explaining the mechanics.
The idea of video games interests me way more than actually playing video games does. I can and have watched several hour long video essays on video games I have never and will never play, and I love those videos because they allow me to experience a game via proxy, because if I tried to play it myself I'd get bored or frustrated in 15 minutes and never touch it again.
It's not that they're too hard or anything, I think it's like, my brain immediately feels like using my time to do this at all is a waste. Like it's weird but it's the same brain mode I got throughout my entire time in school. Every time I was assigned a worksheet of 50 identical math problems about kids who buy 250 bananas my brain would wonder what the actual point of this was, I would feel like a mouse in a maze, and my brain would just shut down in protest. The very concept of playing video games makes the back of my brain scream that I'm being cheaply manipulated by a computer into wasting my time in a virtual skinner box.
And I know that's really funny and stupid especially given the prior statement about watching dozens of hours of video essays about video games. And arguably I'm wasting my life more by passively watching people talk about stuff than I would be playing games. But this isn't some cohesive worldview I hold, this is all monkey-brain nonsense. Or some undiagnosed neurodivergence because the only therapist I've ever seen said she "didn't believe in" giving official diagnoses.
And so this is why I choose to waste my time on movies and TV.
