Do you feel that games are just not for you anymore?
It's a common sentiment of the TEU comment section that the reason a lot of AAA games sell well is that the people who play them are sniveling, uncultured, unsophisticated mindless consumers. Fundamentally incurious, artless normies who place consumption at the center of their lives instead of creativity. The video game player equivalent of someone who listens to burger music, who's entire house is joylessly filled with appliances and objects found in trendy TikToks, and enjoys Amazon Prime original content. They yearn for progression systems and have real relationship-ending opinions on the ending of The Last of Us. Woefully unintelligent, if only they understood that the Sony Entertainment Product placed in front of them is merely a mimicry of the most surface level elements of the art and philosophy that inspired the developers. How we pity them - if only they could understand the beautiful humanizing friction of an arcade game.
To make matters worse, there does exist a group of people who agree that a lot of AAA games are spiritually and mechanically ugly, but only through the lens of their business practices. They move on to indie games that are full of the same uninteresting decisions, "content", and engagement-hacking mechanics and gleefully point out "it's okay because it's $5 and it's not REAL gambling". Crimson Desert is middy boo-boo AI checklist slop, but Balatro and Vampire Survivors are awesome because they LET you waste hours of your life for $4.
Jokes aside, I just feel like we're never going to dial back the demand for addictive game design. People who play games want to be obsessed with something, and the slightly more critical of that bunch just want it (sometimes performatively) with an indie aesthetic. I see this yearn for addiction everywhere. I wonder how much of the shift in games today is because the people who want compulsively designed games are making them, and they do well because that's what people want. If that's the case - when is it time to say that games are just not for you anymore?