This post was originally gonna be about tilting in video games but I thought it might be cooler to instead write about what I enjoy in video games as that is probably a healthier thing to focus on. This article will feature incredibly lukewarm to cold takes.

I play a lot of video games at the moment, across a variety of genres. Here are some examples of what I have played in the last month off the dome:

• Yakuza Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name
• Counter Strike 2
• Deadlock
• Silksong
• Magic: The Gathering Arena
• Smite 2
• osu!
• Overwatch 2
• Taiko
• Euchre Mobile
• NERTS
• Ghost of Tsushima

I have probably left some off but that does display a nice range of games: competitive multiplayer and single player, story based and perpetual, challenging and relaxing, etc etc. Each of these gives me something different to escape from the daily horrors which I'll explore a bit now.

Story-based Single Player Games

What makes me like or dislike a video game is often quite inconsistent. I was very critical of games like recent assassin's creeds that are, in my view, repetitive ubisoftlikes, but I've 100%-ed Cyberpunk, which is also undoubtedly an open world collectathon, and both these and AC you could simply not engage with the random collectibles and play the story if you don't want to. I'm a big fan of the Yakuza series, which has storytelling full of tropes, significant asset reuse, hour-long cutscenes, and only recently discovered saving the game whenever you want. One of my favourite games of all time, Nier Automata, I always have to recommend with a caveat of "it's actually relatively boring for the second quarter of the game, but its worth it", despite mocking One Piece and Naruto watchers for saying shows are good despite filler arcs (not that Route B is a filler arc I think it is a cool storytelling mechanism but Nier would have to really spark your wires in Route A for it to not bore you a little). I don't have the drive to put 1000 hours into balatro or slay the spire but I can get several 10s of hours out of games like that.

What I'm mostly getting at here is just going into a single player game it is not always possible to predict if I'd like it or not (not a particularly controversial statement admittedly). Everyone has some perfect combination of story and concept and execution and presentation that makes a game fun to play, as well as fun to look back on and discuss. Despite my love of rating media, I struggle to make the scores consistent because games are so hard to compare, and there is an ever present paradox of not liking a well made game or loving a really shit game. If I love a game I should be able to give it a 10, but does that mean I'm saying it's better than the game I gave an 8? I remember showing someone my backloggd once, and they gave it back in a huff as I had given both Among Us and Super Mario Odyssey a 7. Reducing a game to a number eliminates a lot of important context, both about the game itself and my experience with it - how many hours did I play? Were there bugs and glitches that ruined the experience? Was it made by 1000 well paid professionals or one guy in a basement? - but I just pretend that this isn't a problem and give it a number based on vibes. It leads to head-to-heads sometimes having upsetting conclusions but it does mean games I like go towards the top.

It also begs the question of why do I rate games? Am I giving it an IGN-style review? How do IGN even factor things like the context like studio size or design flaws vs bugs? Maybe I am actually just rating my fun count? But then well made games I didn't like will be rated low and people will question why I didn't like it. Where is the cutoff for when I'm even allowed to rate a game? If I play it for an hour and get bored is my opinion worth anything at all? Maybe I am just giving it a rating so people can view my backloggd profile and get an insight into my personality because of what games I play.

Anyway, I've sort of gone off track. If you were to look at my time played on games you might assume my favourite games would include factorio, Pokémon, Skyrim, The Witcher 3, Minecraft. All very fun games, don't get me wrong, and I have put a lot of time into them for that reason. For some reason however, despite their proven effectiveness at getting me to enjoy my time with them, they have not broken through to the peak. Pokémon is fun but mostly because of nostalgia as newer versions feel outdated. Minecraft is fun because of the mods that turn it into a different game. The Witcher 3 has a great story and presentation but the combat is monotonous. For each of these games I have critiques that prevent it from reaching the my personal upper echelons.

I've given 8 games a full score on backloggd:

• Tears of the Kingdom
• Yakuza 7
• Nier Automata
• Driver San Francisco
• Mirror's Edge
• Shadow of Mordor
• Fire Emblem Awakening
• Cyberpunk 2077

These are all pretty fun games for one reason or another, however similarly to the games I have played the most these games all have pretty large flaws I am aware of: for example, Driver's story is not incredible and invisible walls rip you out of the immersion of the driving; Yakuza 7 has the asset reuse and erratic story of the previous games with all the jank of a freshly made turn based combat system, lacking balance and polish that is later added in Yakuza 8 (which didn't get a 5/5); and I've already talked about the design decisions of Nier Automata; Fire Emblem Awakening can be trivialised by only using two units and tanking instead of using strategic placement and midlevel tactics; Cyberpunk 2077 had a rocky launch but even with years of updates and expansions the RPG elements are still fairly underdeveloped and there are still immersion ruining bugs. Obviously something about these issues make them unimportant to me. This isn't a particularly groundbreaking statement - I clearly put a lot more weight in some elements of games than others, as does everyone - but what those elements are is quite inconsistent game by game.

Playing Silksong after following the hype for a while, I scoffed at people complaining online about Silksong boss runbacks and difficulty. I even beat the bosses they nerfed pre-patch. They were trivial and everyone complaining was a whiny baby. Then I encountered the one runback that made me lose all my money and I have not been able to bring myself to open the game since. The same gameplay that felt clean and satisfying was immediately a slog. The elements that make a game fun don't just change game by game, they can change hour by hour.

There isn't really a message or conclusion to draw from this section apart from that it is a complex topic that I think about often.

Multiplayer Games

The bulk of my gameplay in recent years has been into Competitive Multiplayer games. I am counting osu! here, because even though the gameplay is solo minute to minute you are still predominantly playing for the purpose of your skill increasing, usually compared to other players through leaderboards or the performance point ranked ladder. I don't really have the stones to psychoanalyse myself too much here but the main point I am coming here to make really is that even though I would say I like winning and care mildly about my rank, I have not played competitive games for the purpose of improvement for long, with osu! being the only exception at 6 years or whatever at this point on and off. The real motivator for me playing a competitive multiplayer game is actually the friends I'm playing the game with. Overwatch in 2016, Counter Strike over covid, a brief valorant stint, Smite 2 recently despite a long time hatred of mobas - each of these games I have tried the ranked mode, but it was the people that kept me there.

That's not to say I'll play any game if I'm playing it with good people - I'm still fairly sure that I don't care about league of legends (although I would imagine it is quite similar to Smite 2 and so I probably wouldn't despise it), and games like Rocket League or Teamfight Tactics do not particularly interest me. I also do play co-op games with people, but generally there'll have to be some sense of progression for me to stick around. Story games like Borderlands or perpetual games like Deep Rock Galactic with their battle passes are good fun but do have a fairly limited lifespan - there are very few in my memory that I was motivated enough to play on my own for any considerable period of time. I've been roped into "friendslop" games a few times but they usually fail to hook me for more than a session or two. I once tried out the co-op game "Trine" but was so buggy I couldn't put up with it, so we both had to stop. There is definitely a need for some sort of nebulous draw to the game for me to play it with people. I was going to talk about it in more detail for specific games but it sort of turned into hypocritical malding so I'll just leave it at this: there are too many factors going into why I like multiplayer video games and the biggest is probably the fact I live in a studio flat on my own and all my closest friends live in different cities.

I was also going to talk a bit about osu! but I have sort of failed to get back into it ever since I stopped having hard deadlines I needed to meet. There are some plays I dream of doing but the reward from achieving them has gone down over the years, and the "de-rusting" wall is harder to climb each time I come back to it. Despite this I am still quite active in the community, which is probably the only reason I come back to it occasionally too. I like the idea of grinding and improving at something, and the leaderboard and community of osu both gives an easy means of measuring progress and a group to share your achievements with. Sometimes I do think I want to take it further, put in the training hours, but there is always a feeling in the back of my mind about how I could be using the time better. Not that I ever do, but it is easier to ignore those thoughts with social games like CS or single player games with a story. I've occasionally had similar thoughts of CS, especially since I spend far too much time watching people better than me play, but again there has never been a real feeling of "hmm I should improve" that lasts longer than one session of aimbotz.

Conclusion

I think ideally I would actually spend less of my time playing multiplayer video games, not because they are inherently bad or because they're a waste of time or anything but just because the list of things I want to do that isn't video games is always a lot bigger than the list of video games I want to play and yet 3 hours every evening is dedicated to CS instead of like, practicing the piano, taking photos, doing some sort of physical exercise, cooking real meals, etc. This is also true of youtube or whatever other slop I am consuming. Everyone and their mother says that they want to cut down on their online activities without actually doing so and I will probably continue to be one of them. Despite the flak I give for the tiny telephone I do applaud maxim for taking steps to try and introduce barriers to the slop realm. I think it would be wise to improve at something while I still have infinite free time due to a lack of real responsibilities (apart from the PhD but that will surely be fine). However I think I would be fine continuing to play these games as long as they continue to be something for me to talk about or reminisce on. The baroldtages are a good example of why I play CS - not only do I get to live these moments but I get to look back and re-experience them too. All those friends I mentioned before I made because of CS, despite it being an osu server, so it would be a shame to just stop entirely. Maybe I should try video editing on something that isn't a fragmovie.