1 – Games are my primary source of entertainment; I primarily spend my free time by working on hobby projects, playing games, and socializing. It's true that the amount of choice nowadays is overwhelming—the backlog of games I want to play keeps getting longer instead of shorter, and it's likely I'll never end up playing everything I'd like to play... but it's pretty much the same with any sort of media.
I want to elaborate here on the "developer eye" angle—while I'm not a games developer, and thus engage with games in a mostly 'untainted' way (though I sometimes make mods for them), I professionally work as a translator and that has certainly soured the enjoyment of translated works for me—I keep noticing calques, weird solutions, or plain mistakes whenever I read any translation, which makes it hard for me to immerse myself. Of course, I can still read original works (if I know the language), which circumvents this issue, and that's not possible with games development. Presumably everybody has this sort of "professional bias", which makes it hard to purely 'enjoy' things they know inside and out, instead of looking at them with a critical eye.
2 – I interact socially with other people every day, primarily through Discord. Discord is my social hub, where all of my social circles have gathered, including the real-life ones. This seems to be the reality of things nowadays, and it's hard to find a (relatively) young person who doesn't use Discord.
I want to elaborate here on the "developer eye" angle—while I'm not a games developer, and thus engage with games in a mostly 'untainted' way (though I sometimes make mods for them), I professionally work as a translator and that has certainly soured the enjoyment of translated works for me—I keep noticing calques, weird solutions, or plain mistakes whenever I read any translation, which makes it hard for me to immerse myself. Of course, I can still read original works (if I know the language), which circumvents this issue, and that's not possible with games development. Presumably everybody has this sort of "professional bias", which makes it hard to purely 'enjoy' things they know inside and out, instead of looking at them with a critical eye.
2 – I interact socially with other people every day, primarily through Discord. Discord is my social hub, where all of my social circles have gathered, including the real-life ones. This seems to be the reality of things nowadays, and it's hard to find a (relatively) young person who doesn't use Discord.