A short clip from my last video, where I call Madrid the most beautiful Ankara in the world, blew up on Instagram (probably people from Ankara loved it). So I started thinking about making city content instead, and then I noticed how close that reflex is to the way I’ve been looking at games lately.

I’ve been a gamer since I was eight or nine, starting with the NES, which everyone in Turkey called “Atari”. I was never good enough to compete, but games were always part of my life, and I built friendships around them. I still wear a Nintendo t-shirt.

Then I started working, and at some point open-world games stopped being fun. During the day I was closing tasks at work, and in the evening I came home to close more tasks. Someone paid me to close tasks in the morning, then at night I paid Steam or Sony to close tasks someone else had prepared.

So I got bored of running errands for some auntie, and I slowly drifted away. My memory was part of it too. Controls got more complex and I’d forget them after a few days off, while stories got deeper and even one or two hours a day was hard to find.

That’s how I ended up with short loops, and the worst one was obviously FIFA. I may have sunk more than 2,000 hours into it in three years, and I’m not proud of that. I just opened packs and did the objectives on the screen, which was still closing tasks, only with a shorter dopamine hit.

The 20-minute matches felt safe, since I’d never fall asleep waiting for a cutscene. However, it still turned into “one more match” until 3 or 4 in the morning. Hades worked better, with 30–40 minute runs and mythological characters I already knew.

Meanwhile I couldn’t bring myself to start the games I actually wanted, like Zelda or The Witcher 3. I finished Red Dead Redemption 2, but it was a struggle. The newer Assassin’s Creed games talk about 50, 80, 100 hours, and even Cyberpunk felt like too much.

Eventually I realized games were giving me anxiety instead of fun. If I remember correctly, someone at Nintendo said the core mechanic being fun is what matters most, and that’s exactly what was missing.

Lately I’ve spent more time on the Nintendo Switch. Mario Kart is incredibly fun, and in plain Mario games I can play for a few minutes, fail, and not care (maybe that’s aging too).

The same goes for Sony’s Spider-Man, where swinging around is the core mechanic, and catching up on Pokémon, since I finished the old ones dozens of times as a kid.

To be honest, the story is where I give up. I enjoyed The Last of Us, but I struggle to remember faces even in real life, so keeping track of game characters is freaking hard. In Part II I stopped around halfway.

So for me, this is the same pattern as the Madrid clip. A hobby keeps turning into a job. These days I only ask whether a game is fun, which is why GTA 6 is the one I’m waiting for, since Rockstar focuses on fun. Maybe I’ll finally start Zelda too.