Browsing your steam library for five, fifteen, thirty, sixty minutes with your face blankly staring at the monitor knowing full well that whatever game you do decide on playing, you’re only going to spend the next thirty minutes, at best, playing before you quit out of boredom.
In the modern era, people will tell you that it’s completely reasonable to feel overloaded with the influx of choice afforded by the internet and contemporary production of goods and art. I’m here to tell you that it is not reasonable to feel this way:
Choice is, in itself, a choice. There is no reason you should waste time deciding between which video games you should play and which you should leave behind. In a properly functioning mind, the decision to pick up a new piece of art, whether that’s video games or some other medium, is final. Once that decision is made, a mind should stick to enjoying, studying, and playing that medium until it decides that it’s time to move on.
When you sit in front of your monitor staring at video games that you might play, you increase the amount of time spent decaying (literally decaying) your life relative to the amount of time spent actually using that life. More importantly, you show signs of a few undesirable traits that I believe are brought on by an increasingly common set of habits art-enjoyers partake in.
These undesirable traits include a lack of conviction, the inability to sit still and commit to a task, and a content attitude towards brain-rot. That’s just the truth of the matter: if you can’t commit to absorbing a piece of art in its entirety, you’re exhibiting a lack of self control in a very child-like way.
My opinion on this comes from anecdotal evidence. I see the problem again and again, and the fact that you’re even reading this article means that you’ve probably experienced it yourself, so we can skip the necessity for hard data, yes?
The complaint that there are “so many video games, but nothing to play.” seems to crop up with an unwelcome repetition these days, and although the issues leading to this apparent boredom with the video game medium seem somewhat intangible, they actually have very easy fixes and can be identified within seconds of self-reflection.
First, the fact that it’s become common-place in the last decade to play video games, read books, or watch movies with another medium at the same time is a huge problem. When you’re playing a video game while listening to something else in the background, whether that’s music or a podcast or whatever, you’re diminishing the value you get out of both of those mediums for the sake of abating your ape-brain’s need for more and more stimulation.
I’ve seen people play video games while listening to music, which obviously means I’ve seen vice-versa, and I’ve seen people watch movies while playing video games or scrolling through their phones. Yes, I realize OSRS was literally built for that kind of gameplay, but you gotta realize that just means what you’re doing demands no mental exertion, causing a regression in your art-absorbing faculty’s abilities under minimal duress.
In a weakened state, your mind caves at the first sign conflict. Games that don’t hand you the victory, stories that don’t spell the plot out for you, music that requires a bit of study and attention to fully appreciate, and any other form of art that requires work and, subsequently, is actually worth your time, become impossible to partake in.
The result is a human that can only half-engage with often low quality, familiar art with no new knowledge or experiences gained. The rotting of the mind becomes a state one’s content with, and eventually the degradation is so severe that even a small task is too much to handle, leading to the eventual topic of this article: scanning the steam library, staring at all of those games you own with no urge to play a single one, and no urge to do anything else with your time.
The solution: Pick one game. Uninstall the rest of them until you complete that one exact game to completion, pick a second game while uninstalling the first. Repeat. Don’t play your game with music or podcasts on in the background, don’t scroll through Reddit looking for tips, and don’t immediately walk away from a title if it gives you a difficult challenge.
If you don’t feel like playing that one game you have access to, do anything else with your time. Go to work, work out with some music, read a book, watch a movie, yell at children walking home from school, literally anything else is better than doing a leisurely activity when you’d rather not.
TLDR; You find yourself scrolling through your steam library without being able to pick a game because you lack the ability to commit to any one thing. Take out the background distractions and force yourself to play a game to completion with no guides from the internet, no music on in the background, and only when it feels like a nice way to relax. Stop engaging in behavior that degrades your mind’s ability to focus, it’s childish and embarrassing.
GLHF,
-E
