I used to play until the middle of the night without even noticing the time. Now I can launch a game, spend a few minutes in it, and if anything feels even slightly off, I immediately want to quit.
The feeling that comes up most often is simple: what’s the point? It starts to feel like a waste of time. Before, I didn’t need any bigger goal. I could just play for the sake of playing.
Back then I knew only a small number of games. Downloading one or two was enough to keep me occupied for months, sometimes even years, without getting tired of them. I could stay up all night with Stellaris or Mount & Blade and not even feel eye strain. Now I can install dozens of games onto my computer and leave them sitting on the desktop. I open one, play for a few minutes, and already feel tired. Sometimes I don’t even click the shortcut. I just hover the mouse over the icon and mentally run through what the experience will probably be like. In those few seconds of thinking, it feels as if I’ve already played it. Then it seems pointless, so I move to the next icon and repeat the same process. Just sitting there, cycling through possibilities in my head, is enough to make it feel like I’ve already finished every game before even starting.
People online call this digital impotence—being burned out on games, unable to get excited the way you used to. Maybe part of it is that some of the games I played earlier really were that good, or that new to me at the time. Something like Skyrim left a deep mark. It’s just an old open-world game from around 2010, barely ten gigabytes by today’s standards, but after playing it, so many later games advertised as “open world” felt strangely flat by comparison. Once that sense of novelty is gone, it’s easy for newer releases to become bland.
So the search shifts. If spectacle no longer works, maybe what matters is gameplay. A few months ago I dug up some older Japanese games from A社 and E社. They really were fun. The problem was that they were also exhausting. They weren’t the kind of games you clear once and put away. They demanded multiple playthroughs, branching routes, different storylines, and in some cases even a guide. I did find that old, focused feeling again for a while—the ability to sink into one game’s story path and grind through it properly—but once I downloaded a lot of them, the same problem came back. Even if the gameplay is great, the moment I think about how much repetition and grinding lies ahead, my motivation collapses. Then they just sit on the hard drive, opened only occasionally whenever I suddenly feel like it.
It’s a bit like that saying: one monk can carry two buckets of water, two monks can carry one bucket, but three monks end up with no water to drink. Too many games means too many choices, and too much choice can ruin the whole thing.
What makes it worse is that I never want to delete anything. Every game feels like something I’ll definitely play someday. So I keep downloading things without playing them, and even after trying them I still don’t remove them. Storage fills up quickly. At this point I’ve turned into a collector of everything—games, videos, wallpapers, software, anything I come across. I just collect it. I’ve nearly filled four or five terabytes of cloud storage already, and meanwhile my attention has drifted elsewhere.
The laptop I use now was bought as an office machine. The memory is soldered in, so I can’t upgrade the RAM. It can’t hold that much, it can’t run that many games well, and the hardware isn’t really enough anyway. So now I keep imagining that once I have a bit of savings and some free time, I’ll finally build a desktop and maybe even set up a Synology NAS. Just thinking about that feels good.
This whole period probably has a lot to do with boredom too. Right now I’m just waiting for an internship. During exam week not long ago, things were the exact opposite. The more I wanted to study, the more wildly I played. I’d stay up until two or three in the morning gaming. Then as soon as the exams ended, the withdrawal kicked in and I started feeling lost. Without a concrete goal, even games became irritating. I’d play while distracted, restless, unable to settle into anything, and everything started to feel meaningless.
Before the exams, there was only one target: the exams themselves. I could muddle through the rest of life. After the exams, suddenly everything became a target, and none of it felt like something I could afford to be careless about.
During downtime, I picked up Honor of Kings again, and suddenly gaming became fun again. The fun of multiplayer really does seem stronger than the fun of single-player, at least sometimes. That sent me chasing other multiplayer games too—Don’t Starve, Left 4 Dead, PUBG, and so on. After playing online games for a while, though, I started missing single-player games again. Then single-player began to feel enjoyable once more.
So this so-called digital impotence is more complicated than it sounds.