A friend of mine has this weird proclivity with games. He's the mentally laziest person on the planet, so when he starts new games, he'll play them for like 5 minutes, then turn it off and go back to his previous game because he doesn't want to learn the new gameplay mechanics, systems, control scheme, etc and all that stuff. So for most of his gaming life he's spent like 75% of it playing just a handful of games that he plays over and over and over again. He'll stick with games he knows even if he's played them to death because he'd rather just play a game he doesn't have to learn and knows inside and out than learn something new. Even if he's bored of the games, he'd rather be bored than spend the mental energy to learn a new game. Some games he'll play for years and nothing else. And these aren't multiplayer games btw either. He played the game Freedom Fighters on PS2 all the time. And he tried getting into Xbox 360/PS3 when they came out, but as usual, he'd give the game a few minutes, sometimes a few days, not have the mental capacity to learn the new game and then go back to Freedom Fighters. He played Freedom Fighters regularly, I'm not joking, until well into the 2010s. He said he doesn't even really like it that much, he just knows the game well.
I've been trying to get him into newer consoles over the last 5 years because I know there's some games he'd flat out love if he would just sack up and put forth the effort to learn them and get into them. And to my surprise it was actually working. I gave him my old PS4 a handful of years back and he bought some games for it. God of War, Resident Evil 2 Remake, a few others. He beat all them eventually, and loved them. He freaking loved RE2 Remake. He loved God of War, but God of War took him like a year to complete, and he never would've went back to it if I didn't implore him to do so. But he finally did only because his old PS2 gave out and he couldn't go back to Freedom Fighters. And this other game he got on PS4, some RTS game he played that wasn't very difficult to learn he kept going back to that. I forget the name of it.
Over the past year or so he started to get into newer games more so I recommended a bunch of games and he bought some of them. The latest were God of War Ragnarok and Red Dead 2. He did the same he usually does. He started each for under an hour and went back to that RTS game on PS4. But eventually he got to God of War Ragnarok and finished it. He loved it. Then after that instead of jumping into Red Dead 2, he went back to the RTS game. I'd ask him every few weeks if he started getting into RDR2 and he kept saying "Not yet" and make up some nonsensical reason like "It's too cold out to play Red Dead 2, that's more of a summer game for me" when I knew the real reason was it's a complex game that takes a lot to learn and he was too lazy to learn it. But whatever, he can do what he wants, so I stopped asking.
Then fate intervened again. The save data on his RTS got corrupted or something happened to it and he lost all his data. And he got fed up so he finally buckled down and started Red Dead 2. And he'd text me about it and how amazing and realistic it was and how much he liked it. And he'd text me questions about it off and on and offer advice. This was over the span over a few weeks. Then one day I stopped getting texts about the game and I'd ask him if he's still playing it and he'd just say he's taking a little gaming break to focus on catching up on some movies and shows he missed.
So the other day I went over his place to hang out a bit and I'm walking through his TV room and I notice he has a PS2 hooked up to his TV. And I'm I thought your PS2 broke and you got rid of it. He's like no I bought a refurbished one recently. And then I stopped for a second and I was like wait a minute.... don't tell me. And I went over to it and hit the eject button and inside his PS2 is Freedom Fighters. And he starts laughing. And then I pieced it all together. He never took a break from gaming to catch up on movies or shows. He stopped Red Dead 2 because it was too much to learn and went back to Freedom Fighters again. In 2024. And my days of trying to get him into new things have ended. It felt like it was working there for a while, but this is the final defeat, I'm taking my L on this one.
Just wanted to share this random story.
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