I always dug Bulbasaur's evolution the most. I'd be curious if you had any great breakthroughs in game design while you were sitting silently in boredom? I feel like that would just add to your insights here.
Oh, one hundred percent. Indeed a huge percentage of the difference between a great and merely decent game is when you're willing to step outside yourself and realize when you're bored AS YOU'RE PLAYING the game. A lot of the time it's just like 'eh, but people are undergoing the process'. If you're attentive though, you learn a lot: what experience am I *trying* to convey, relative to what experience I am actually going through as I playtest?
In other words, boredom isn't just like 'the absence of any stimuli' or whatever; it can also be 'the participation in a soul-destroying or otherwise just mind-numbing process', like hour three of data entry or whatever. But those themselves are moments where it's on offer to decide to be attentive!
Could boredom now be related to the dying of longer-form content and increasingly 'easy to access' aspects of entertainment, academia, etc, etc? This leads to the paradox of excessive scrolling and the use of entertainment, with the occurrence of boredom, even if we can fail to recognise it in some places.
I think very much so - like 'lag' in longer-form content becomes so much less tolerable, since the traditional ebbs/flows of narrative structure have been obliterated in the flood of SFV's 'prime you all the time' normative mode.
In before the first critique of my choice of Pokemon
I always dug Bulbasaur's evolution the most. I'd be curious if you had any great breakthroughs in game design while you were sitting silently in boredom? I feel like that would just add to your insights here.
Oh, one hundred percent. Indeed a huge percentage of the difference between a great and merely decent game is when you're willing to step outside yourself and realize when you're bored AS YOU'RE PLAYING the game. A lot of the time it's just like 'eh, but people are undergoing the process'. If you're attentive though, you learn a lot: what experience am I *trying* to convey, relative to what experience I am actually going through as I playtest?
In other words, boredom isn't just like 'the absence of any stimuli' or whatever; it can also be 'the participation in a soul-destroying or otherwise just mind-numbing process', like hour three of data entry or whatever. But those themselves are moments where it's on offer to decide to be attentive!
Could boredom now be related to the dying of longer-form content and increasingly 'easy to access' aspects of entertainment, academia, etc, etc? This leads to the paradox of excessive scrolling and the use of entertainment, with the occurrence of boredom, even if we can fail to recognise it in some places.
I myself wrote about boredom a little here https://theorymatters.substack.com/p/the-problem-with-boredom
I think very much so - like 'lag' in longer-form content becomes so much less tolerable, since the traditional ebbs/flows of narrative structure have been obliterated in the flood of SFV's 'prime you all the time' normative mode.