There was a time when something like this was normal to me:
+10 stamina +5 health +10 rads A small treat for the wastelanders after a good old explore trip
I used to live in such a world and experience life like this, but I've been made to accomplish hard-won feats of communication, documentation, writing, expression, and study. And because of it, I have learned so much, perhaps too much. It is hard to live in such a world again. I do miss when I was still so infatuated with games like Age of Empires 2 and Rise of Nations and with all kinds of RPGs, from text RPGs, Flash RPGs, MMORPGs, Roblox games, League of Legends, Minecraft, and infinitely more kinds of games that encourage progression and experience. Because I have stopped feeling this way about video games, I have stopped feeling this way about LitRPG progression fantasy web novels, comics, and such (and just progression action stories in general). This has extended toward the visual gamification of tools like Notion and Obsidian.
Now, I just sit down and write, and at best, I feel the gamification of having all of my writings in my computer, organizing them, counting how many words I've written, and publishing them online. Computers are inherently gamified in that sense (such as through coding and website development, with HTML feeling like a gamified structure), but I have grown distant from the traditional idea of "gamified" over the years.
It is not that I do not still interest myself with coding, as just said, and I can still appreciate architecture, systems, structure, layouts, website design, code architecture, etc. It is just that I have stopped consuming gamification in the mindset of a "gamer" or "web novel reader" or someone seeking a gamified solution like Notion.
There was a time when I loved the feeling of seeing a number go up in a Roblox RPG game. Very simple mechanics and little to no storytelling. I remember playing such games.
But now, I see the word counts go up, but it is so much more than just a word count. It is not that I was shallow when I was younger, since I did appreciate books, novels, children's books, videos, and all kinds of other media. It is more so that I was still learning very much.
Now that I have grown so much, it is easier to say that I am not just on a number-go-up, because the weight of the "dollar" has grown so much. In the past, the weight of the number-go-up was tied to RPG games, but now, the weight of the number-go-up is much heavier, complex, complicated, nuanced, precisely communicated, elabored-upon, and so on.
When I was younger, my value of experience was 1. It is still 1 today, but the difference is communication. A mother and a son struggle through their differences because of what? A lack of effective communication. The difference between my younger self and my current self is that while the value of experience is the same, my capacity to communicate that value has evolved and become even more potent, accessible, widely receivable, and synthetically resonant.