I used to get most of my video game info from magazines and books⁵. The argument could be made that magazines like Nintendo Power were thinly-veiled advertising vehicles, and I wouldn't fight you too hard on that. There is a blurry line between coverage intended to convince you to buy a thing and coverage intended to tell you about the thing that you might end up buying if it sounds cool. That's not a debate I'm interested in having here.

Advertising vehicles or not, books and magazines that covered games were fun. Or, at least you could tell that the people who were writing them were having fun. Part of that is because these things didn't cover industry news like game studios shutting down or how some developer turned out to be a creep. And it's not that these things aren't important, they are, but it would be weird to mingle a casual overview of a cozy Mundane Task Simulator™with article about The Very Worst Kind of Person© sprinkled in with tips and tricks for that hot new dungeon crawler. Blogs and modern video game 'news' websites do that anyway.

Even in the bog-standard coverage articles, I don't get the impression that anyone is having any fun. I don't want to psychoanalyze anyone⁶, but every article about every topic is composed with the same matter-of-fact, emotion-free, boring analysis that just puts me to sleep.

Magazines effectively no longer exist⁷, and we didn't really talk about books. Video game books are their own weird thing that deserve a deeper dive one day, but video game books now are mostly coffee-table art books. You can't really read them because there's nothing in there to read.

I enjoy a good single-player experience, but video games are really best enjoyed with another person. Atari figured this out in 1979 and put four controller ports on the Atari 400 and 800 computers, later Atari consoles let you hook up four paddle controllers. Later consoles had multitaps, handheld consoles had link cables, arcade cabinets had multiple sets of controls.

Of course, 'enjoyed with another person' doesn't always mean that you're playing Street Fighter or whatever. You could have a friend who's playing the same game you are and you meet up to talk about tips and tricks and puzzle solutions and dissect the story and do all the things that you would do when you talk about any activity.

That's a lot harder to do now. Partly because there are so many games released every day⁸ that it's all but impossible to accidentally play a game at the same time as your friends without doing some kind of coordination.

And even if you do take the time to do that, there's another problem. Games will continuously try to sell you things.

Games are, at their heart, either a repetitive task that you do repeatedly until you fail or a series of tasks that you do like an extended checklist. Usually it's a mix of both. They're activities, sometimes with a story attached. The problem, though, is that everyone has a different threshold for how much busywork they're willing to do. So, you can bypass the work, for a small fee, of course. Or, if you're having trouble getting past some obstacle, you can buy some help. Or you could buy some costumes for your character in the game. Or you can buy some extra characters. Or you can buy some extra side-scenarios. Or you could buy different voices. Or any number of things.

Of course, all these things are optional, legally. But they're so lucrative that some games are even given away for free, but they have in-game stores and ads that constantly try to upsell you on things. It's annoying, it's draining, and it's an affront when you just want to sit down for a few minutes and solve a few simple puzzles while you wait for your lunch to heat up in the breakroom microwave.