I can only speak to living in rural suburbia USA but when I was 15 my hobbies were severely limited by the lack of independence. No ability to drive, part-time employment, academic busywork and parental oversight severely curtailed the range of experiences I was able to enjoy. This somewhat continued into college as I had to spend breaks working full-time to pay for tuition and housing. In these types of circumstances video games are a great hobby because they're affordable social experiences that don't require travel.
Now that I'm fortunate enough to be liberated from these considerations I choose to do more expensive outgoing things like backpacking, going to festivals, trying new restaurants, biking, etc. I make occasional exceptions but these days I try and stay away from video games; it'll be easier to catch up on all the games that I missed when I'm retired in 30 years and don't feel like walking 20 miles in a weekend.
For sure I get that, and same. I mostly play games these days on Steam Deck as a wind-down activity that competes with reading a book or watching a YouTube video. It doesn’t complete with high energy activities anymore.
It's an indicator to the amount of time one has spent on coping and accepting the inconvenient truth about their past hobbies that they fervently lie to themselves and others about.
It's not a mystery to anybody else why they immediately switch interests after finally reaching stability to 'do the thing they've always wanted to have time to do' and glorified multiple years of their adolescence engaging in: they aren't interested in it as much anymore, or were never actually that interested in it. It's weird that they'll always be the last to figure it out.
Video games don't charm me like they used to. Somewhere around college I logged into IRC and realized I like online socializing more than I like gaming.
Single player games are lonely. Multiplayer games are mostly competitive. Cooperative multiplayer is just socializing with busy-work added. And they usually demand an entire screen to themselves, when I would rather have a few windows open at once.
