Gaming in general, but video gaming in particular. I've been a video gamer since around 1986, and I've seen what it can be go through many cycles, my biggest gripe with it now is really fourfold.
1: Politics shoved everywhere. This can be an amazing part of a story arc, or using the medium as a parable. Today, it's not used as a storytelling method mostly, it's used as a cheap gotcha, or worse, the entire game will revolve around one pertinent point to the story with no real exploration of any opposing perspective or viewpoint. Now, this can be fine if the world is built like so many, as a fight of good vs evil, but most recent games that have political connotations, whether overt or subtle, don't have enough depth for the message to come off as anything more than annoying preachiness. Now you could bitch up a storm about this on your favorite place to, or you could simply not play the game. Since I've been around games so long, I tend to just take the latter option, because unless I'm looking to troll the easily offended on internet spaces explicitly designed to take offense to reactionary or opposite opinions, I'd rather just go play a more fun game. And I can still do that, thankfully.
2: Corporatism. Literally anything creative will get sucked into the maw of this. I know many here won't remember the day of DOS and early consoles, but there was so much creativity in what you could do with really limited hardware and software. Hell, even when the original NES came out, there were plenty of weird and fun titles put out that were just there to have fun with. This continued apace until more or less recently, when video games became more of a lifestyle commodity than just a fun hobby or pastime. This can be blamed on many factors, but the biggest one imo was the big corps realizing what an insane cash cow gaming could be and then, in typical corpo fashion, having the HR departments hound all the fun out of it, while simultaneously trying to gobble every minutely profitable IP up with promises of absurd payouts. This works well for a very few, just ask Notch, but it stifles creativity overall. And the stuff that the corp teams themselves put out are almost* universally soulless cash grabs with great graphics and not much else.
*Japanese and Eastern Euro studios tend to be somewhat immune to this sort of thing, but I've noticed even they are being slowly forced by the hand of finances to change their products.
3: Gamer "culture". This ties in with 2, but used to be quite bit different. I'm not really going to get into what it was like pre internet, because it was magazines, BBS's if you had a modem, local people you knew into it, and the local software store, if you had one. The early internet was a total goldmine for this hobby, because you could finally connect easier and gush or bitch about it or trade patches, the games themselves *cough* Doom *cough* or whatever else. And most people were at least somewhat pleasant to talk with, at least until fandoms took root. This all changed when gamer/nerd culture got mainstreamed by the corps in 2, leading to a huge slew of people and entitled kids invading what used to be a very autistic, but usually somewhat welcoming disjointed community. All that crumbled in short order under a wave of bullshit, drama, trolling, tribalism and acrimony.
4: Social media. This barely needs to be talked about. Once everyone realized they could share their opinions with literally everyone, the niche stuff died off, or went to Reddit or Discord to ossify, be over moderated, or simply desiccate.
It's not all bad though. There's still tons of games out there, many old, some new you can have fun with if you truly enjoy gaming. It does help immensely to game with a PC though. You don't even need a really powerful one.
![LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]](http://uploads.kiwifarms.st/data/avatars/l/61/61177.jpg?1699571951){kind=avatar}
and top of the oppression hierarchy, the autustic nerds have found a loophole for clout and shielding from bullying, so all of a sudden, that nerd that was picked on in grade school for endlessly sperging about Pokemon Red and Blue or Sonic The Hedgehog is now a True And Honest Woman
