>>53717672I think treating video games as anything other than toys (or on rare occasions as tools with certain sandboxes and sims) has had disastrous consequences on gaming as a whole. The modern meta of video games is to either make the everlasting game (funded through freemium or subscription means), the ultimate competitive game (it's basically as fun as a toy that's designed to be played a very specific and limited way is) or as an alternative way of telling your super serious story (most of them are good, but they're almost always watered-down in either the story or gaming category). It has become painfully clear to me that the best "competitive" games aren't actually the best games for competition; they're just the most fun games that inspire people to want to compete in them.
It seems like we're always trying to treat games as something more than they are, when we need to be fine with the fact that imperfections are the things we relish about games and characters, let alone life. The only enjoyment I can see someone getting out of competitive Pokémon is the rush of winning or the nuances of probabilistic decision-making, and you'd have to be really autistic to find that fun for more than a few hours.
