bluelander

MMOs and games like PoE are basically designed to be addictive slot machines that you play forever. You're not supposed to get anything out of them other than the dopamine hit at seeing a big jackpot that keeps you pulling the lever. As you get older and time spent is more meaningful for you, it's easier to think critically about your experience with these kinds of games and ask yourself if the time spent is actually worth it. Don't feel bad that you got addicted, Blizzard and co. pay psychologists lots of money to get people addicted. Just cancel your subscriptions, uninstall the games, and feel grateful that you got hooked on a game with a flat monthly fee instead of a gacha game. You got off easy compared to a lot of people.

As for what to play instead, my advice is to look into pre-internet games that you haven't played, games that are designed to be an authored experience and not an endless loot treadmill. If you have a half-decent PC, you have thousands of games available to you through emulation. Go back and play some SNES or Playstation games that you never got around to. If you haven't looked into it in awhile, emulators for newer consoles like the Gamecube and Dreamcast have come a long way, as well as consoles that used to be a bit fiddly like the N64 and Saturn. Go back and look at some classics you never got around to. It's a good feeling to discover a new game, have a great time with it, finish it in 10-20 hours, and have a complete experience. Make a backlog of games you're interested in and start clearing it out. Print out a list and get a rubber stamp so you can slam down a big ol' fat DONE on games you finish. It's a lot more rewarding than spending the same amount of time farming a raid boss to get a sword with a slightly higher number on it.

This is like Marijuana Simpson except instead of "What if Homer Simpson smoked weed" it's "What if Grampa Simpson was a gamer"

"Video games can't be too violent because they're fake polygons and not real people like in a movie" is such a mystifying take that it's hard to take seriously, but here goes:

A book can be too violent, and that doesn't involve looking at or listening to representations of real people at all. It's just words on a page. "Too violent" doesn't mean that violence is literally happening to humans, it means that the depiction of violence is too explicit or gruesome or gratuitous for a person's comfort level. That's obviously subjective, and more visual and auditory realism can affect a person's threshold, but it doesn't have to involve any real people at all except an author and a reader. If someone made an interactive fiction game out of 120 Days of Sodom... I'd have to check it out, because it'd be too weird not to, but I wouldn't make it far before I had to quit. The depiction of violence in the book is too off-putting for me to read, and being put in the position of being forced to act out that violence to move the narrative would take it to another level. A narrative that involves a strong emotional connection to a character can also move the threshold. It's easier to watch a Mortal Kombat character rip out someone's spine because the fiction is a wacky cartoon world where death isn't real. It's easier to shrug off because it's not taken seriously by the story or the characters, you're not expected to empathize. When a realistic gruesome depiction of violence happens to a character you spent several hours getting to know on a human level, it makes whatever violence happens to them that much harder to deal with. I can easily see why TLoU2 would be too much for some people.

Framerate isn't just graphics, it's also how a game feels to play. A game running at 60 fps polls the controller input twice as often as a game running at 30 fps, and is thus twice as responsive. For a turn-based RPG or tactics game, sure, it doesn't matter as much, but for an action game like Saint's Row, it impacts your ability to play. This is why consistent frame rate is so much more important than high frame rate: when the game is suddenly less responsive than your muscle memory is used to, it severely impacts how it feels on a subconscious level. If it's a constant 30, it's easier to adapt to it, but it's still not acceptable for games that require a certain amount of responsiveness, like fighting games and rhythm games. Try playing Rock Band 4 on a PC that can't hit 60 and you'll quickly realize that yes, you can tell the difference, and no, it's not about how it looks.

(also important is that this is 100% subjective and there's no point in arguing about it. Everyone has their own tolerances, but saying there's no difference at all is just factually incorrect. If Jeff says something's unacceptable to him, then it is, much like how the diagnostic criteria for pain is whether someone says they feel pain. There's no objective way to measure it, so just listen to what people say.)