I completely agree, environment and stimuli must factor into how we accept/remember video games. Like for me, I grew up in northern California and then the "boonies" of Arkansas for my later teen years. Both places I was not close to town (though I walked many times in California). It was play video games or go to the beach (California) or hunt and fish (Arkansas) for me. While both can be fun, they eventually get boring when that is all you do in your free time. That left me with video games as I did not have cable television growing up.

That gave me a healthy love of video games and reading books, and a healthy respect for nature as a whole. I cannot remember how many times I almost ended up in a bad situation out enjoying nature - from almost drowning to encounters with wildlife, and my own stupidity of a situation.

Leaps of faith are far more fun in video games. Trust me.

I checked out Overwatch when it first came out and was like, nope. Still the same way now. I just don't get it. Course a lot of those games I don't get. I can play a mean game of PUBG Mobile but I have yet to get a kill on the PC version (though I can make it to the last 5 people in the game).

Kids today have so many games available to them it is not funny. In our day we couldn't just load a web page/app and have access to new games. We had to travel to a store, wait for help, look at the back of the box, ask for another, deal with snotty employees, then when a game was chosen travel back home to play it. In that same amount of time, kids today have already gotten bored with a game that doesn't connect with them and moved onto another.

I guess some games just connect with us in ways we don't realize.