If you don’t like what the AAA industry is putting out or how they’re pricing it, just don’t buy it. Play older games, or newer games that aren’t produced by major studios, or make your own games. Or play games around a tabletop with your friends. Or a virtual tabletop, if your friends don’t live nearby.
Or go outside and take a walk in the woods. Read a book. Write a book, or a short story, or a poem. Weave, knit, crochet, or spin. Homebrew beer, or wine, or mead. Home-distill some moonshine, and share it with those whom you love, and whom you trust not to rat you out to the tyrants of the BATF.
Go take a gun-safety and basic gun-handling class (or learn from an older relative), if you’re into first-person shooters, then go out to a shooting range (or set up a bullet-trap in the woods so you’re not leaving bits of lead everywhere, as stick a hand-drawn target on that, if you love somewhere that’s legal). Buy a gun of your own, if you’re of age, not a felon, and not mentally ill in a way that makes you a danger to yourself or others, and use and store it responsibly. Go hunting, and eat what you kill.
Take up a sport. Take up watching a sport, and throw in some statistical analysis if that’s your thing. If so, I recommend baseball (and looking into sabermetrics). Or softball if you’re willing to put some effort into compiling an adequate body of machine-and-human–readable play-by-play data for the NPF and/or NCAA, and then duplicating the analyses that went into generating the body of statistical knowledge that already exists for baseball — and if so, please, drop me a line, as this is a project that I’m hoping to get started on soon, and we should probably coordinate our efforts!
Carve wood. Split wood, and burn it for warmth. Get a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino, and build something amazing. Learn to use Linux. Learn to use OpenBSD. (Learn to use Minix, if that’s your thing.) Learn to understand some portion (or all) of the relevant source code if you’re so inclined, and fine a way to contribute.
Learn to use xv6, and to understand its source. Set up a PDP-11 emulator (or acquire, or build, (a functional of) an actual PDP-11, if you’re into hardware and have the resources) and learn to use UNIX Version 6, as presented in the Lions Book, and to understand its source. Or, if you lean a different way, get or emulate an Intel 8080 (or other compatible chip) and learn to use and modify CP/M.
Write your own operating system from scratch, but using what you’ve learned from examining existing system. The history of varies UNIX-style OSes suggests that if you’re well-prepared, it should take somewhere between 1 and 3 person-years to get it to a reasonably functional state. Good luck.
Learn to weld. Learn to build in brick, or stone, and build something useful. Learn to garden, and set up a vegetable patch. Learn to farm, and set up a homestead.
Take up meditation. Teach meditation. Honor the gods with service, with prayer, with sacrifice, or with all three. Honor worthy humans. Honor worthy animals. Do works of charity. Feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and give medical care to the sick, either directly or by giving money. Get into effective altruism, or get into debating the merits of effective altruism. Become active in local politics.
Do any or all of these things and a thousand others. Some require money, or an able body. Some require both, and some require neither. Some require particular natural talents, and some can be done by anyone who’s willing to put in the time and effort, and who’s capable of reading this post in the first place.
And play AAA computer games as well, if that’s your thing. But if the average cost-per-hour of those games, multiplied by the number of hours per month you’re spending on them, is a meaningful burden on your finances, the odds that how much AAA games cost is your biggest problem — or is even on the same order of magnitude as your biggest problem — are low indeed.
Me 