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How often do you a) play games, and b) talk to people?

3 years ago1,822 words

A couple of questions for you! Also some rambling about why I'm asking.

It's been quite quiet around here recently! I used to write personal posts frequently... I think of ideas for posts every day, and often start writing them out, only to give up because I either don't want to put people off supporting me by saying stuff they don't agree with, or I don't think anyone will really care so there's no point. I miss using this place to write out my thoughts, though.

So here's another attempt at writing a post I started then gave up on yesterday!



I'm frustratedly unmotivated! Over the past couple of weeks, I was burned out on Atonal Dreams, but madly focused on some personal projects - including Mentales - to the point where I'd look forward to waking up and feel disappointed when I had to sleep because I was just so eager to be productive. This week, that energy and focus have just completely gone, and I've been struggling to focus on anything creative or productive. Bleh.

I'm still hoping to ask for Atonal Dreams testers at the weekend, but... I'll save any specifics or excuses about that for the Weekly Update.

I thought I should probably try to play a game, which I haven't done in a while. Chrono Cross was the last one, but I finished that a couple of weeks ago. I haven't played anything on this new PC!

Which is sort of silly since I'm supposed to be making games, right?

As a child and a teen, I'd play games for hours and hours, lost in their worlds... and a lot of my fondest memories are of video game worlds I immersed myself in. As I got focused on making my own, I started seeing other games with a developer's eye, or with envy, which sapped a lot of the joy out of them... I've written about that before.

There's also abundance of choice, though. Back in the day, I had a number of games for the consoles I owned, and that was it, so I'd replay them over and over. Now, I can get any of the millions of games available digitally, instantly, whenever I want, which leads to indecisiveness about what to play that generally results in not playing anything. Or when I do play anything, it's a revisit to a game I played in the past and already recognise.

I get frustrated that people aren't receptive to Atonal Dreams and just want more MARDEK, or to novel ideas in general because they prefer familiarity, but it's not as if I'm an exception to that!

It's annoying, though, because when I do discover new games, they can be portals to new worlds to get satisfyingly immersed in just like the ones from my childhood were...

There are a bunch of games I'd like to play, but keep putting off starting on any. I'd love to replay all the old Final Fantasies - since they were huge inspirations and I'd like to see how I interpret them with my adult mind - and have had the recent remakes of the first six on Steam open in a tab for weeks (months?). But that's a huge time commitment! I've also got the Kingdom Hearts games to work through, which is just as much of a commitment... I was waiting for the FFVII Remake to get a PC port so I could play that, which it now has, and there's that game Horizon Zero Dawn which I got ages ago but never actually played, and now it has a sequel too, and Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is coming out but I still haven't played the second and want to replay the first and-...

Then I think I should play indie games too, as I often do. Think that, I mean, not play them. Sometimes, rarely, it actually leads to getting and playing one, but it's been a while. What I really should be doing is playing other indie RPGs to gauge the competition, but... ehhh. I don't. I should! But I don't.



Similarly, kind of, or not, I rarely interact with anyone these days, online or off. I used to have people I'd talk to online every day, and I felt some sense of involvement in online communities like deviantART or my own sites, most notably Fig Hunter... Now I don't do any of that.

My social life is like one text message a week, and I'm terrible at replying to messages or emails on the rare occasions I ever get any. Comments here, too!

I'm just stuck alone in my bubble all the time, in my head, and I strongly suspect not playing games is directly related to this... though I don't suppose I ever really played games my friends (when I had those) talked about or liked? Hmm, how did I ever find games then? I can't remember at all!

I've been taking baby steps towards involving myself with a couple of Reddit communities focused around mental health issues I have, but I should probably be involving myself with indie dev communities too. I keep thinking about it! But I keep putting it off, not even due to anxiety necessarily at this point - much of the anxiety I used to have about posting on Reddit has dissipated - but just... I don't know, inertia? Hard to start something new? Depression? Something like that.

(Probably the same reasons I've been stuck in my parents' house in the same rut for years now...)

I saw a random youtube video about the game Spore recently - which is unpleasantly considered a relic of the ancient past now even though it still feels quite new and recent to me (I hate getting old) - and noticed in the comments that someone linked to some indie dev projects hoping to essentially make their version of Spore (which at least some people are apparently hungry for): one is called ∞ Elysian Eclipse ∞ (for reasons elusive to me, though maybe Atonal Dreams would be the same to others), and the other's more plainly called ∞ Adapt ∞. I'll need to make some 'advertising stuff' for Atonal Dreams soon, so I've been paying particular attention to how those websites are laid out (though I wonder to what extent having such a site even helps at all in terms of final sales).

Elysian Eclipse mentions ∞ a Patreon ∞, which I always check and compare to my own. It's got three tiers, all higher than my own, and is earning £1361 per month from 105 patrons, which is more than mine's earning by quite a bit. I don't get the impression the dev has any previous notable work, but I suppose those supporters are primarily motivated by that hunger for a new Spore (I should totally make a new Spore, shouldn't I? Yes, I'll drop everything and do that).

But that's sort of beside the point. More importantly, I always see these indie projects stressing their Discord as highly important, with a lot of calls to action to join the community and such. The Adapt page has a big Discord button right at the top next to the trailer. The bottom of the site links to ∞ a press kit ∞, too - like one I made for Memody: Sindrel Song (which helped it to sell millions of copies, of course) - and included in the list of images are a bunch of what I'm assuming are Discord emotes... or something? I'm only vaguely familiar with the concept, don't know how they're used, and obviously haven't ever made any myself. I'm assuming they fill the same niche as things like temperament icons I had on Fig Hunter... but I feel so disengaged from online communities now than I did then and it's hard to even really get into the right mindspace.

I haven't been in my own Discord in eons, and while I used to get random notifications of people posting in there, I haven't in ages; I don't know if that's because it's died or because the algorithm assumed I no longer wanted them. I should go in there right now and check, but... just mustering up the mental energy to do that feels beyond me at the moment. Which is stupid, I know. It's not anxiety exactly, just this heavy feeling of reluctance. I think a big part of it is because things like that all bring up a lot of 'emotion memories' of managing Fig Hunter - the dread at what I'd find and have to deal with - coupled with negative assumptions about 'nobody caring', and that leading to financial failure, which would be confirmed if I see that it is dead. Well, all that plus general Avoidant Personality Disorder which is about - shockingly - avoiding things.

Makes me wonder though whether most indie devs are constantly in discords - their own or other peoples' - and I'm just some old codger who's out of touch with how people work in the world these days (as if I was ever in touch with that any days). I also wonder though how active these abundant indie dev discord servers ever are, and how much active discord communities contribute to sales in the end, and whether I'll have to overcome the mental blocks preventing me from engaging socially with anyone if I want to have any hope of financial success, then whether I'm too old and past that to even be capable of it...



Anyway, all that rambling was to get to a couple of questions I want to ask of anyone who's actually even bothered to read this:

1 - How often do you play games?

2 - How often do you interact with other people, especially in a friendship kind of way (as opposed to in a work way)?



Also, since it's not worth a post of its own but I think it's interesting anyway: there was some kind of US Congress... thing... involving UFOs yesterday that I'm led to believe is A Big Deal with regards to acknowledging UFOs are a real thing and should be taken seriously. A shift in The Government's official stance, that kind of thing. I watched a 90-minute-long livestream of it, which was as fun as it sounds. The general feeling in r/UFOs was that it was a joke because they just waffled on about bureaucracy and didn't introduce any of their grey alien colleagues or show any wreckage they've definitely collected but they're just hiding it can't you see the lizard men are keeping us in the dark. THEY'RE COVERING OUR EYES TO THE TRUTH!!

But yes. Those questions!

(Gasp, I actually finished writing this one and posted it and everything!!)