Yesterday I finished another Detroit: Become Human playthrough, and this game is super fun. It is so beautiful and so cinematic. Even though it came out in 2018 for PlayStation, if you are a gamer, I recommend you give Detroit: Become Human a try. The game has so many beautiful cutscene graphics, and your choices matter. It is like creating your own movie, where you get to decide how the movie goes. It is one of the few games I have actually played all the way through twice, and it is so cool to see how the different decisions I made in the game changed the outcome. There are these flow charts in the game that show you all the different possibilities, and that alone makes it so much fun.
I originally live streamed this game, and it is a perfect example of a game that just sucks to live stream. It is meant to be played like watching a movie, except it is a choose-your-own-adventure movie. So what I like to do now is turn off all the lights in the studio, play the game, and get really into it. What is really cool is that in the timelines on the flow chart you can see what choices other people picked. It is interesting to notice when you pick the same choice as most other players versus when you took a drastically different path. That is what makes this game so fun.
Two very different playthroughs
The basic premise of the game is that you are an android. You play three different androids who are becoming self-aware and trying to break out of their programming, and you are there to guide a revolution that may or may not come. On the first playthrough I did, I tried to be more peaceful and cooperative. I screwed up being peaceful, though, and the public still hated androids anyway. Despite me trying to be nice, they boxed all the androids up.
So in the playthrough I just finished, I went the other direction and was as ruthless as the game allows. It is really interesting to see how everything worked out taking that approach. And there are still so many more approaches I could have taken, so many other things I did not unlock, that I could easily go through and play it a few more times. This has got me wondering what other games like this I could play. I researched in Gemini and found there is a game called Immortality that might be good for me to play next.
What I found is that I really enjoyed just settling in and playing this game an hour or two a day, all the way through, without recording any videos while I was playing it. The footage I have of the game is from an old live stream I did, but the playthrough I just finished was just me really getting into the game. I am not a person who generally watches movies unless I go to the movie theater, and I do not watch TV. This, to me, is so much more fun and interactive than watching TV while being really similar to it. There are two characters I had already shown, and the third one is involved in one of the very pivotal parts of the story. It is not an open-world game. There are kind of fixed lanes you go through, but your choices drastically determine how the game plays out later, and it feels so immersive. With everything happening in AI right now, a story about androids becoming self-aware is even more relevant than ever. To me, this is as good as gaming gets: I can lose myself in a game for a few hours, and then I took a walk after finishing the game last night. It was really cool to see the ending I got, which was so much different from the ending I got on the last playthrough.
It is also fun when you screw stuff up in the game. There is a part where I was trying to escape and needed to spend the night somewhere. You could stay in a hotel, you could stay in an abandoned car, or you could stay in an abandoned house. The first couple of times through, I got the car and the house, but I could not get everyone to stay in the motel because androids were not allowed to stay in a motel. This time I stole some clothes, stole some money, and then managed to stay in the motel. It was nice. I had wondered what it was like there.
Grinding for ego versus relaxing into a game
I hope my gaming videos encourage you to look at how you game, because a lot of gaming is super repetitive, and a lot of the way people game is boring. It is not even an escape anymore. It is just a grind. You are grinding for ego, and I am bored with gaming like that. For me, I just want to chill, lay back, and have fun gaming now, which ironically is something I do not want to live stream. Imagine watching a movie and chatting the whole time. It would ruin the movie. So ironically, you would think being a gaming streamer is so much fun, but just grinding out the same game, trying to level up, get more kills, and win, like in Warzone, gets boring really fast. I shared the whole story of that chapter in Call of Duty Warzone: How I Got Famous Streaming and What It Cost. Meanwhile, playing a game like Detroit: Become Human is often something that is not actually very watchable while you are playing it, but it is so much fun to sit back and play.
I have no desire to sit there and play Call of Duty Warzone off stream. If I am not trying to show off for somebody else on stream, these are the kinds of games I am playing. That is why I really want to make sure I make videos about the games I am playing that are fun, because that is where most of my time is going in gaming now. It is a big part of why I wrote I'm Quitting Twitch Streaming, Hopefully for Good: the games I most enjoy are the ones that are worst to stream.
Gaming as a treat instead of an addiction
What is so cool is that I thought gaming was an addiction, something I had to stop and had to quit. I went back and forth, gaming and then deciding I could not game and was not going to be able to game anymore, because I had been gaming addictively. I told that story in Video Game Addiction: Why Gaming Was My Hardest Habit to Quit and went deeper on the cycle in Video Game Addiction: Why I Quit, Relapsed, and Quit Again. What I am happy to see now is that, yes, there are some things for me like gambling and alcohol where there is no need to gamble and no need to drink, because in my experience they always end up being toxic. Playing a game like this did not feel like that at all.
For example, there were a few days where I had only about four hours to work before the kids got home, and the question was whether I wanted to play some Detroit: Become Human or keep working. Or I had an hour or two before bed and had to decide whether to play some Detroit: Become Human or film one more video. Last night I recorded, and then I played, and it felt so abundant. It helped me be grateful. I am so grateful that I have time in my life where I can afford to just play a video game. I would rather play a video game than watch a movie at this point most of the time, unless I am going to the theater. And when I took that walk afterward, I felt so embodied. Just playing the game actually helped me be really present, get out of my usual self, and have the right amount of escape.
I know it can be fun playing Call of Duty Zombies with friends, and it used to be. But this, to me, is gaming at its best: relaxing and playing for an hour or two, feeling like my whole day got better, feeling like I really enjoyed the game, and feeling like gaming is a little bit of a treat, a little bit of a dessert. That is the balance I was hoping to find when I wrote Back to Gaming After Quitting: Why I Keep Coming Back.
Ashley Cummings just sent me a voice memo asking, "Don't you have any vices?" Well, I am playing a few hours of video games every week. Maybe you could consider that a vice. What is nice about games versus TV and movies is that they are more interactive and involve more thinking. I remember before, when I was playing this at home with my wife and kids and live streaming, it felt like it was putting me in this dysphoric universe of violence and conflict. But you could say the same thing about Harry Potter. Almost all fiction books and movies are going to be built on that same environment of conflict. Going somewhere like that can help you appreciate the life you have, and it is just fun. When I am at home, single, and not doing anything, this is what I do for fun: hang out and play some Detroit.
About 30 hours in Detroit and even more in Blueprints
I also played Blueprints, and that was another awesome game. I think I played Detroit: Become Human for about 30 hours. I played Blueprints for even more hours than that, although I live streamed a bunch of it. That was another game that is just meant to be played off stream, sitting back, having fun, and really escaping into the game. There is absolutely value in escaping and having fun.
So if you are watching my gaming videos, I hope you give Detroit: Become Human a try. You can even play it on PC now if you have something like a PlayStation controller. I have a PS5 that I played this on, and you can play it on a PS4 as well. I will record footage of me playing some of these other games so I can share them and tell you about each one, and encourage you with a "hey, if you missed this one, give it a look." This is one of the most fun games I have played all year, even though I had played it once before a few years ago. You can find every one of these game videos in my Games playlist.
Building my own games is the future of gaming for me
At the same time, I am also building my own games at jerrybanfield.com, and that is a lot of fun too. I showed the first of those in I Built My Own Version of Vampire Survivors with AI, and even made a trivia game about my own life in Top Jerry Banfield Fan: Playing My Own Trivia Game About My Life. For me, that is the future of gaming: building my own games on jerrybanfield.com, and then playing some relaxing, cinematic, really immersive movie-style games like Detroit: Become Human.
If you want me to help you build your own games, or you want help with anything else, I am a life, business, and AI coach, and I am there to help you with anything in life, business, or AI. You can schedule a call with me. I hope to see you on another Jerry Banfield video soon.