I stopped playing video and computer games regularly around 2011. I've been playing them since the 1980's.

I always enjoyed playing them and I've spent countless hours on computer strategy games like Civilization and MMO's. I would spend whole evenings playing NCAA Football on Xbox.

But it all kind of lost its appeal for me once I hit 40. For a number of reasons. First, I started doing more things with my time outside of that realm. I bought land to manage for hunting, I started grad school. Honestly the main reason why I stopped was I didn't have time for it anymore.

But once I had been away from it for a while, I realized some things I didn't like about how video games have changed. For starters, I've found the whole multiplayer focus of console games to be unrewarding and repetitive. It's like developers have ditched a good PvE experience in favor of multiplayer battlegrounds where they do less work on content. And the people on those things... ugh... don't me started.

And speaking of PvE, I don't like games that aren't open-ended, which railroad you along a story that you can't break out of. And there's so many of them now. Zero replay value on almost all of them.

The whole scene is so money-driven now, with in-game purchasing, extra fees for downloadable content that should have been there to begin with, monthly subscriptions...

I just find it all to be less "wonderful" now than it was years ago, when picking up a game meant spending some time in a new world. Now, it just resembles some place I never want to visit, with assholes, pimps and barkers constantly in my face, wanting either my time, my patience, or my money.

These days, when I have time to play games, I just invite friends over for Catan or 7 Wonders or board games like that. The games are more fun because actual people are more fun, and in-person human interaction is rare and, sadly, novel again.