December Days 02025 #24: Gamer
Dec. 24th, 2025 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptIt's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.
24: Gamer
I did say at the beginning that much of what I've learned on the technological side was in the service of playing games. That's not so much a brag as it is an admission that I was not the most social child. Some of that was living somewhere relatively remote without peers to hang out with, some of that was because being a smart kid doesn't always make you a lot of friends, some of that is wanting to see what was going on in fictional worlds and solve their puzzles a lot more than what was going on in the world of the people around me.
My parents would make mention of this last tendency with insistence that I go outside and play regularly, and that I was the kind of person who adapted their gait to be more like a video game character. I did not have the language, nor the temerity, to ask them to not refer to such things because of their untruth in a way they would take notice of, but I certainly wanted to. I would not be surprised that my parents were looking for signs that I might be withdrawn and introverted and otherwise more comfortable in the digital than the real, and they didn't find any of them they found altogether too disconcerting. Mostly because I also played summer sports and did, in fact, go outside to play when I was told I needed to. And participated in other activities as well, so that I could see my friends on the regular, even if that meant enduring yet another round of teasing from people who didn't actually want us there and who found us too far away from being their conception of normal kids that they wanted to bully us out of the space.
My gamer stuff started early, first with the Kaypro and with the Atari 2600, a video game machine where the box art of the game vastly outsold what the actual game art itself would be. The resolution wasn't great, the blocks were only vaguely human-shaped at best, and there needed to be a lot of imagination to think of this as something more like what the box art (or the cartridge art) suggested it was. Even so, I spent a fair amount of time playing Video Pinball, Super Breakout, Circus Atari, and some of the other games that weren't designed to be endless, but instead some kind of actual finishing point. I remember a cartridge that I swear was title "Skate or Die," but it was nothing like the Nintendo cartridge of the same name. And one game called Secret Quest, that had a password system you could use to restore your game to where it was. Unfortunately for me, much of the later stages of the game that I got to had me low on the energy needed to operate weapons and on life needed to not die. One of these days, I might go back and complete it, if I can, assuming that I know what to do about it. Oh, and Secret Quest had hidden rooms in it, as well, that you had to know where to look for things to get inside. Most of the time, those hidden rooms contained more powerful, but more energy-consuming, weapons. And pickups of either energy or life were not plentiful, so getting to the correct place to collect the necessary self-destruct code, finding where the exit teleporter is, and then inputting the code and escaping were all pretty difficult by themselves, without any additional need for finding secret spots and mapping those out, too. I suspect the way you succeed at this game is by fighting only the minimum of monsters necessary, dodging well, and routing out the fastest way to get everything.
There was also a Gauntlet clone called Dark Chambers that was exceedingly fun to play, and not just because there were skips and warps you could use, once you had found them, to get back to where you were before, without having to traverse the intervening levels. (Saves were rare in those days, most cartridges and games were either infinite loops where you went until you made a mistake, or the fancy ones had a password system that would allow you to set the correct variables to teleport yourself to the correct place and with the correct types of upgrades and so forth. Password systems are now considered much more of a throwback idea, but they're still there, after all.
As I aged, and I acquired secondhand gaming systems and the cartridges to go along with them, I also got some talking-tos from my parents about having selected some gory violent games, and about making sure that I wasn't thinking about using the weapons in those games, or in fantasy shows, on other people. No, my parents, for as much as you worried I might disappear into the digital, I have a reasonably good sense of where the boundaries are between the fantastic and the real, and a strong understanding that reality does not work on any kind of mechanics like games do. For no other reason than that the games themselves are predictable within a certain amount of the RNG, or the games themselves have the capability to perform feats that human players cannot, or that I don't actually want to live in a Sierra adventure world, where death lurks around every corner and curiosity, and several things are very specifically hostile to you. This was a time, though, where content ratings for video games were certainly going to be developed, after enough people complained about games like DOOM, Mortal Kombat, and other such things where the point was to make red pixel clouds of others, and eventually actual three-dimensional gibs of an entity flying off into the world. Impressionable children and all that, and eventually, those kinds of games would be at the forefront of who to blame for when two teenagers committed acts of mass violence against their schoolmates. The assumption was that the music, or the games, or some other outside influence must have been responsible for these children choosing such things, because it certainly could not have had anything to do with how the teenagers were being treated by their peers and instructors, or any undiagnosed, untreated, or un-believed mental health conditions that might have been present for any of them. Even now, when these acts of mass violence are written repeatedly across our schools and institutions, there are so many people who are looking for something, anything, to scapegoat and blame and put up a fuss, so that nobody has to do the hard work of getting legislation and regulation through that would curb easy access to weapons of mass killing, make it harder for someone to have a weapon of mass killing on their person, and also provide sufficient supports for kids who are being ostracized, bullied, or who need additional mental health support to make it through the parts of their lives that spark these kinds of actions.
For a significant part of my high school and university life, "gamer" was one of the things that I used as a core part of my identity. I was smart, and I was good at games. Except I wasn't actually all that good at games when it came to other people being involved. Or I was, and I was playing against people who had more time and investment in getting very good at those games, and so they were better. Getting beaten regularly at those times meant I picked up a new, not very flattering nickname about my flailing about on the controller, trying to get it to do the things I had practiced and knew worked. It was supposed to be fun, but I had over-invested in a label and was regularly being proven that I wasn't that good at video games at all. And while there was the Internet, and I will bet there was plenty of bad behavior in many of the competitive online games, and possibly bad behavior in any massively multiplayer online games, the enclaves where bad behavior in games and constant derision of each other hadn't fully come to the fore. Those enclaves would lead to things like calling in terror threats to get the special weapons and tactics team to break down a door and point or shoot weapons at the people who were just playing games, and they would be at the forefront of creating spaces that were marinating in just about every -ism imaginable, while claiming to be the objective best and that they wanted things like "ethics in games journalism," a misdirection for their entire amount of upset that women were covering their favorite games and rightly panning them, or that they were interested in trying to have relationships with women, but they were so far under the bar that they would not receive a second glance. I did not have those enclaves available to me to try and dive into and become a significantly ethically and morally worse person than I am.
Three things helped me stay out of that particular cesspit. The first is that I wasn't trying to get good at the games that generally produced the largest amount of people trash-talking over the voice chat, or that would presumably throw out all the homophobic insults they could about gameplay when they were losing or winning. This was because of the second thing, which was that I had hit a fixed mindset barrier, and come to the conclusion that even with additional practice and time, I was simply never going to be as good at these games as the other people were, and therefore I should accept my place on the hierarchy as near the bottom and stop trying to improve. I could still be good at the adventure games, and do all right in the single-player modes, but I just wasn't going to achieve anything remarkable, and that was it. The thing that I wanted to be, I could not be, and I was not willing to go so far as to consider that everything the game permits is permitted, and only the things the game itself forbids and can enforce are forbidden. This second idea, that I'm not actually good at games, pretty well pulled me off the track toward worse places.
Not being god-tier at games also forms the foundation of my belief that all game achievements should be geared toward someone playing the game casually, and never even include any components where you have to play online or get winning streaks against other players. Game designers disagree with me, and think that some achievements should be perpetually locked to only the h4r35t of h4rdc0r3 players, who are willing to put in the thousands of hours it would take to make those achievements, to have to become good enough to possibly play on a competitive circuit. I don't want to spend the effort or the time for that, and one of the "if I ruled the world, but could only make insubstantial or petty changes" things that I have would be "I would mandate that all games come with an option where you can just turn the switch and be awarded all of the online and multiplayer achievements, because not everyone will be able to play online or with others." So that way, a game designer can include all the demands they want for playing online or against other players in competitive settings, and every player has the option to opt out of that scene if they so desire, and not be penalized for it.
The third thing that kept me away from joining the terrible places, because I wanted to be respected by my gaming peers, is time. As an undergraduate, and then into grad school, I had precious little time to devote toward training myself to get better at those kinds of games (and even then, I still gravitate toward the many-hours one player RPG instead of the MMO or the competitive one-vs-one or multiplayer brawler games.) And then, after graduate school, I was a professionally employed person. I had the games. I even put on programs where the teens could hang out and play the games, but I wasn't going home after work to spend several hours sitting in front of those games to get better at them. (And, as it turns out, I like the modes where it's much less about "skill" and reaction time, and more about being able to use the arena, or item drops, or other such things to your advantage as well as the skills available to each character.) These teenagers that I was playing with had that time to train and improve and play each other, and I was a working professional with other priorities. I was still a solid Mid-boss, who could defeat and outlast some, but would eventually be defeated by someone else who was stronger and more experienced at the game than I was. And this was okay, because the gaming was there to get the kids together, and to get them to practice specific kinds of positive interactions with each other, and learn how to manage their emotions and situations, and all of the subtle lessons that teenagers don't recognize are there until they're older and enlightenment strikes.
It's weird to say that because I accepted my limits, I didn't go diving into toxic places, but it's the truth. Because I believed I would never get any better, I didn't try to engage in an obsessive pursuit, or hang out in places that would warp what I considered acceptable into something truly toxic. I had all the attitudes that would have been conducive to following that vittra warren all the way to the terrible, terrible core. For the most part, though, I stayed out of the manosphere because, in so many ways, I accepted the things that were bad about me and didn't chase the spaces that would promise to make me better at them, but for the cost of pieces of my soul. (Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it "resignation," since there wasn't any peace that came with accepting this.)
Other things have since moved in toward core parts of my identity, and I am now much more sanguine about my skill at games, even if I get aggravated still when I sense the random number generator has decided not to favor me, or I sense the limiters have come off the computer player without my consent for them to do so. Sneakily enough, however, I also suspect my skill at games has improved some with time and age. My reflexes are still too slow, comparatively, but concepts like space control, using what's available, and taking a breather and waiting for openings are much more apparent to me than they were when I was younger. I can see this in my younger players when they get up to playing each other (and me, sometimes) in these games. It's all attack and little defense for them, and so I often find myself slipping inside their timing windows, or poking them from a strategically advantageous position, or swapping targets and dodging out of the way of their attacks. Sufficiently so that they seem to think of me as a computer player rather than a human, and they get annoyed when I end up on top of the pile in their massive multi-player melees. Those young players are the people for whom the aphorism "Age and treachery will often defeat youth and speed" most applies. It's one thing to be playing the game for a while, but at this point, I can confidently say to many of them that I've been playing this game, and the ones previous to it, for longer than they've been alive. Which gives me a significant advantage over all of them in making good tactical choices and trying to stay out of the danger spaces. They hover around zero net score, I mostly end up significantly in the positive.
All of these things that I've learned and internalized and figured out over long practice have also been helpful when I'm playing pick-up games with others. At convention, picking random characters and many of them being able to defeat the singular character that the other person selected. I'm an all-rounder in a lot of ways, although I don't always adjust well to the bigger, slower characters, and I felt pretty good to myself that I didn't just get the floor wiped with me right from the get-go. And while I may never actually get to succeed well in any way at any given bullet hell game, because I'm still trying to process too much information and I can't do it, I'm doing okay at other things that gesture in that direction, or other roguelike-type games. I still don't have the right kind of touch to be consistently able to do the thing I want to, keypress-wise, but I'm doing the things I want to do more often than I am not doing them. And I can recognize when I've made a mistake, instead of wondering why something happened instead of what I wanted to. And I'm still a pretty good hand at figuring out how to make those RPGs go well and optimally, even if I don't have as much time as I would like to complete them.
So I traded the possibility of being a g4m3r for being a gamer, and I think, all in all, it's been a good trade for me. And learning how games worked has lead me to modding tools and some of the things whree I've been able to get some systems jailbroken, and therefore more reliable than they otherwise would have been. That said, an awful lot of new systems these days strongly resist that kind of longevity extension for them, at least while they're still being manufactured, for understandable reasons. I'm hoping that the Steam Deck's relative open-ness helps move things back toward a less locked-down environment, but I also always want to hope that when a company decides they're no longer interested in a console, they also put on some blinkers about what the homebrew and jailbreaking scene decide to do with those consoles to turn them into more functional and more interesting devices. It was only last year that I finally managed to get my PS2 modded, since I didn't have any of the memory cards that already had the appropriate homebrew on them, but now I can feel more confident in my ability to keep playing games on that console, when desired, and without having to worry about whether something was going to completely brick everything. I want moddable stuff, even though I know that it can't be done that way, because cheating risk and possible copyright violation. But I also want companies to go "we're not interested in this any more. Don't wave things in our faces or we'll Cease and Desist you, but otherwise, have at it." Because these consoles still have life and use left in them, and if some of them can be turned into devices with a more general-purpose affair and functionality, while retaining their ability to play games, then they become catnip for people like me, who want their devices to work until they physically can't any more, even if that device is no longer performing only the original function it was manufactured for.
24: Gamer
I did say at the beginning that much of what I've learned on the technological side was in the service of playing games. That's not so much a brag as it is an admission that I was not the most social child. Some of that was living somewhere relatively remote without peers to hang out with, some of that was because being a smart kid doesn't always make you a lot of friends, some of that is wanting to see what was going on in fictional worlds and solve their puzzles a lot more than what was going on in the world of the people around me.
My parents would make mention of this last tendency with insistence that I go outside and play regularly, and that I was the kind of person who adapted their gait to be more like a video game character. I did not have the language, nor the temerity, to ask them to not refer to such things because of their untruth in a way they would take notice of, but I certainly wanted to. I would not be surprised that my parents were looking for signs that I might be withdrawn and introverted and otherwise more comfortable in the digital than the real, and they didn't find any of them they found altogether too disconcerting. Mostly because I also played summer sports and did, in fact, go outside to play when I was told I needed to. And participated in other activities as well, so that I could see my friends on the regular, even if that meant enduring yet another round of teasing from people who didn't actually want us there and who found us too far away from being their conception of normal kids that they wanted to bully us out of the space.
My gamer stuff started early, first with the Kaypro and with the Atari 2600, a video game machine where the box art of the game vastly outsold what the actual game art itself would be. The resolution wasn't great, the blocks were only vaguely human-shaped at best, and there needed to be a lot of imagination to think of this as something more like what the box art (or the cartridge art) suggested it was. Even so, I spent a fair amount of time playing Video Pinball, Super Breakout, Circus Atari, and some of the other games that weren't designed to be endless, but instead some kind of actual finishing point. I remember a cartridge that I swear was title "Skate or Die," but it was nothing like the Nintendo cartridge of the same name. And one game called Secret Quest, that had a password system you could use to restore your game to where it was. Unfortunately for me, much of the later stages of the game that I got to had me low on the energy needed to operate weapons and on life needed to not die. One of these days, I might go back and complete it, if I can, assuming that I know what to do about it. Oh, and Secret Quest had hidden rooms in it, as well, that you had to know where to look for things to get inside. Most of the time, those hidden rooms contained more powerful, but more energy-consuming, weapons. And pickups of either energy or life were not plentiful, so getting to the correct place to collect the necessary self-destruct code, finding where the exit teleporter is, and then inputting the code and escaping were all pretty difficult by themselves, without any additional need for finding secret spots and mapping those out, too. I suspect the way you succeed at this game is by fighting only the minimum of monsters necessary, dodging well, and routing out the fastest way to get everything.
There was also a Gauntlet clone called Dark Chambers that was exceedingly fun to play, and not just because there were skips and warps you could use, once you had found them, to get back to where you were before, without having to traverse the intervening levels. (Saves were rare in those days, most cartridges and games were either infinite loops where you went until you made a mistake, or the fancy ones had a password system that would allow you to set the correct variables to teleport yourself to the correct place and with the correct types of upgrades and so forth. Password systems are now considered much more of a throwback idea, but they're still there, after all.
As I aged, and I acquired secondhand gaming systems and the cartridges to go along with them, I also got some talking-tos from my parents about having selected some gory violent games, and about making sure that I wasn't thinking about using the weapons in those games, or in fantasy shows, on other people. No, my parents, for as much as you worried I might disappear into the digital, I have a reasonably good sense of where the boundaries are between the fantastic and the real, and a strong understanding that reality does not work on any kind of mechanics like games do. For no other reason than that the games themselves are predictable within a certain amount of the RNG, or the games themselves have the capability to perform feats that human players cannot, or that I don't actually want to live in a Sierra adventure world, where death lurks around every corner and curiosity, and several things are very specifically hostile to you. This was a time, though, where content ratings for video games were certainly going to be developed, after enough people complained about games like DOOM, Mortal Kombat, and other such things where the point was to make red pixel clouds of others, and eventually actual three-dimensional gibs of an entity flying off into the world. Impressionable children and all that, and eventually, those kinds of games would be at the forefront of who to blame for when two teenagers committed acts of mass violence against their schoolmates. The assumption was that the music, or the games, or some other outside influence must have been responsible for these children choosing such things, because it certainly could not have had anything to do with how the teenagers were being treated by their peers and instructors, or any undiagnosed, untreated, or un-believed mental health conditions that might have been present for any of them. Even now, when these acts of mass violence are written repeatedly across our schools and institutions, there are so many people who are looking for something, anything, to scapegoat and blame and put up a fuss, so that nobody has to do the hard work of getting legislation and regulation through that would curb easy access to weapons of mass killing, make it harder for someone to have a weapon of mass killing on their person, and also provide sufficient supports for kids who are being ostracized, bullied, or who need additional mental health support to make it through the parts of their lives that spark these kinds of actions.
For a significant part of my high school and university life, "gamer" was one of the things that I used as a core part of my identity. I was smart, and I was good at games. Except I wasn't actually all that good at games when it came to other people being involved. Or I was, and I was playing against people who had more time and investment in getting very good at those games, and so they were better. Getting beaten regularly at those times meant I picked up a new, not very flattering nickname about my flailing about on the controller, trying to get it to do the things I had practiced and knew worked. It was supposed to be fun, but I had over-invested in a label and was regularly being proven that I wasn't that good at video games at all. And while there was the Internet, and I will bet there was plenty of bad behavior in many of the competitive online games, and possibly bad behavior in any massively multiplayer online games, the enclaves where bad behavior in games and constant derision of each other hadn't fully come to the fore. Those enclaves would lead to things like calling in terror threats to get the special weapons and tactics team to break down a door and point or shoot weapons at the people who were just playing games, and they would be at the forefront of creating spaces that were marinating in just about every -ism imaginable, while claiming to be the objective best and that they wanted things like "ethics in games journalism," a misdirection for their entire amount of upset that women were covering their favorite games and rightly panning them, or that they were interested in trying to have relationships with women, but they were so far under the bar that they would not receive a second glance. I did not have those enclaves available to me to try and dive into and become a significantly ethically and morally worse person than I am.
Three things helped me stay out of that particular cesspit. The first is that I wasn't trying to get good at the games that generally produced the largest amount of people trash-talking over the voice chat, or that would presumably throw out all the homophobic insults they could about gameplay when they were losing or winning. This was because of the second thing, which was that I had hit a fixed mindset barrier, and come to the conclusion that even with additional practice and time, I was simply never going to be as good at these games as the other people were, and therefore I should accept my place on the hierarchy as near the bottom and stop trying to improve. I could still be good at the adventure games, and do all right in the single-player modes, but I just wasn't going to achieve anything remarkable, and that was it. The thing that I wanted to be, I could not be, and I was not willing to go so far as to consider that everything the game permits is permitted, and only the things the game itself forbids and can enforce are forbidden. This second idea, that I'm not actually good at games, pretty well pulled me off the track toward worse places.
Not being god-tier at games also forms the foundation of my belief that all game achievements should be geared toward someone playing the game casually, and never even include any components where you have to play online or get winning streaks against other players. Game designers disagree with me, and think that some achievements should be perpetually locked to only the h4r35t of h4rdc0r3 players, who are willing to put in the thousands of hours it would take to make those achievements, to have to become good enough to possibly play on a competitive circuit. I don't want to spend the effort or the time for that, and one of the "if I ruled the world, but could only make insubstantial or petty changes" things that I have would be "I would mandate that all games come with an option where you can just turn the switch and be awarded all of the online and multiplayer achievements, because not everyone will be able to play online or with others." So that way, a game designer can include all the demands they want for playing online or against other players in competitive settings, and every player has the option to opt out of that scene if they so desire, and not be penalized for it.
The third thing that kept me away from joining the terrible places, because I wanted to be respected by my gaming peers, is time. As an undergraduate, and then into grad school, I had precious little time to devote toward training myself to get better at those kinds of games (and even then, I still gravitate toward the many-hours one player RPG instead of the MMO or the competitive one-vs-one or multiplayer brawler games.) And then, after graduate school, I was a professionally employed person. I had the games. I even put on programs where the teens could hang out and play the games, but I wasn't going home after work to spend several hours sitting in front of those games to get better at them. (And, as it turns out, I like the modes where it's much less about "skill" and reaction time, and more about being able to use the arena, or item drops, or other such things to your advantage as well as the skills available to each character.) These teenagers that I was playing with had that time to train and improve and play each other, and I was a working professional with other priorities. I was still a solid Mid-boss, who could defeat and outlast some, but would eventually be defeated by someone else who was stronger and more experienced at the game than I was. And this was okay, because the gaming was there to get the kids together, and to get them to practice specific kinds of positive interactions with each other, and learn how to manage their emotions and situations, and all of the subtle lessons that teenagers don't recognize are there until they're older and enlightenment strikes.
It's weird to say that because I accepted my limits, I didn't go diving into toxic places, but it's the truth. Because I believed I would never get any better, I didn't try to engage in an obsessive pursuit, or hang out in places that would warp what I considered acceptable into something truly toxic. I had all the attitudes that would have been conducive to following that vittra warren all the way to the terrible, terrible core. For the most part, though, I stayed out of the manosphere because, in so many ways, I accepted the things that were bad about me and didn't chase the spaces that would promise to make me better at them, but for the cost of pieces of my soul. (Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it "resignation," since there wasn't any peace that came with accepting this.)
Other things have since moved in toward core parts of my identity, and I am now much more sanguine about my skill at games, even if I get aggravated still when I sense the random number generator has decided not to favor me, or I sense the limiters have come off the computer player without my consent for them to do so. Sneakily enough, however, I also suspect my skill at games has improved some with time and age. My reflexes are still too slow, comparatively, but concepts like space control, using what's available, and taking a breather and waiting for openings are much more apparent to me than they were when I was younger. I can see this in my younger players when they get up to playing each other (and me, sometimes) in these games. It's all attack and little defense for them, and so I often find myself slipping inside their timing windows, or poking them from a strategically advantageous position, or swapping targets and dodging out of the way of their attacks. Sufficiently so that they seem to think of me as a computer player rather than a human, and they get annoyed when I end up on top of the pile in their massive multi-player melees. Those young players are the people for whom the aphorism "Age and treachery will often defeat youth and speed" most applies. It's one thing to be playing the game for a while, but at this point, I can confidently say to many of them that I've been playing this game, and the ones previous to it, for longer than they've been alive. Which gives me a significant advantage over all of them in making good tactical choices and trying to stay out of the danger spaces. They hover around zero net score, I mostly end up significantly in the positive.
All of these things that I've learned and internalized and figured out over long practice have also been helpful when I'm playing pick-up games with others. At convention, picking random characters and many of them being able to defeat the singular character that the other person selected. I'm an all-rounder in a lot of ways, although I don't always adjust well to the bigger, slower characters, and I felt pretty good to myself that I didn't just get the floor wiped with me right from the get-go. And while I may never actually get to succeed well in any way at any given bullet hell game, because I'm still trying to process too much information and I can't do it, I'm doing okay at other things that gesture in that direction, or other roguelike-type games. I still don't have the right kind of touch to be consistently able to do the thing I want to, keypress-wise, but I'm doing the things I want to do more often than I am not doing them. And I can recognize when I've made a mistake, instead of wondering why something happened instead of what I wanted to. And I'm still a pretty good hand at figuring out how to make those RPGs go well and optimally, even if I don't have as much time as I would like to complete them.
So I traded the possibility of being a g4m3r for being a gamer, and I think, all in all, it's been a good trade for me. And learning how games worked has lead me to modding tools and some of the things whree I've been able to get some systems jailbroken, and therefore more reliable than they otherwise would have been. That said, an awful lot of new systems these days strongly resist that kind of longevity extension for them, at least while they're still being manufactured, for understandable reasons. I'm hoping that the Steam Deck's relative open-ness helps move things back toward a less locked-down environment, but I also always want to hope that when a company decides they're no longer interested in a console, they also put on some blinkers about what the homebrew and jailbreaking scene decide to do with those consoles to turn them into more functional and more interesting devices. It was only last year that I finally managed to get my PS2 modded, since I didn't have any of the memory cards that already had the appropriate homebrew on them, but now I can feel more confident in my ability to keep playing games on that console, when desired, and without having to worry about whether something was going to completely brick everything. I want moddable stuff, even though I know that it can't be done that way, because cheating risk and possible copyright violation. But I also want companies to go "we're not interested in this any more. Don't wave things in our faces or we'll Cease and Desist you, but otherwise, have at it." Because these consoles still have life and use left in them, and if some of them can be turned into devices with a more general-purpose affair and functionality, while retaining their ability to play games, then they become catnip for people like me, who want their devices to work until they physically can't any more, even if that device is no longer performing only the original function it was manufactured for.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-25 10:56 am (UTC)It's interesting to see a situation where the fixed mindset actually helped you out... "You don't always have to become as good at something as you could possibly become" certainly isn't a bad lesson to learn, especially when the thing you're trying to become good at involves others. There's always a certain pressure to fit in in that case, and things can get out of hand more easily, after all.
I'm not much of a gamer myself, so I can't say that much about the content, other than that I agree about games needing to have a full single-player mode (I've never done anything with multi-player myself).