I had an epiphany a few years into the 7th console generation. I found that I was no longer particularly fond of video games. This surprised me, as I had loved gaming ever since the early eighties and games had up to this point kept getting better as they evolved.At the time, I had a clunky, big and somewhat noisy initial model Playstation 3. This was the one which was still backwards compatible with older Playstation titles, and I found that instead of enjoying new games on it, I primarily used it to watch movies or replay older Playstation games.
I initially figured that this probably meant I was getting too old to be a gamer. I had often suspected the day would eventually come, and that what still kept me around was likely just nostalgia.
As it turned out though, I was just playing the wrong games.
I had made the mistake of attributing my disenchantment with contemporary titles to internal factors, instead of the real issue, which was that most games at the time just weren’t very good.
This was the age of the “realistic" first or third person shooter, where realism mostly meant that level designers had to use a lot of grey or brown assets.
Fortunately, games like: «Braid» and «Geometry Wars» (which I discovered quite late), with their colourful and completely unrealistic play-fields rekindled my passion for gaming again. As it turns out, I like my games to not be "realistic".
