>>4788052You got into video games together with your friends. You didn't really care about what it is you played. You may not have been aware at the time, but just the fact that you were able to play with them was all that mattered. Now you are older, you finished school, and you have less time to play with other people you know. Maybe you grew apart, maybe they got a job and are just a lot more busy, either way, you are simply no longer able to spend several hours playing games with them every day.
"But anon", you say, "I was perfectly fine playing Call of Duty on my own". Well sure, once you got into it, you also didn't mind playing randomized matches with strangers, but that's not going to last forever. Call of Duty will become boring after a while. You could try to start learning a new game, but you don't have anyone to do it with, and since you are a noob, everyone just hates on you every time you enter a match. Sure, you met a lot of hostile players in Call of Duty as well, but in CoD, you knew they were the idiots because you had experience. But with a new game, you are completely aware that everything they say is true, that you do suck. And that cuts a lot deeper than you are used to, because you no longer have the confidence in your own ability.
Maybe you even tried to get back into Call of Duty. It may have become dull, but at least it's a safe bubble you are comfortable in. But it's even worse now. You still have all of your knowledge, but you pretty much suck because you haven't played in months or years. So you don't even need anyone to call you out on it, your own brain tells you how much you suck. You know that you aren't supposed to be this bad.
So you retreat offline. You especially gravitate towards simpler stuff, not grand open world RPGs with 2000 subplots you don't even care about, just something you can jump into and do things. You no longer feel, it's just gaming for the sake of doing something, anything.
