I think that's really on point for me. I try to recreate the magic I used to feel playing Ultima, Wing Commander, Gunship, Commanche, Falcon 3, etc. with modern games and find I just don't... care. In terms of personal activities, I could be building something cool in the garage, or out on a real-life adventure, or playing with some electronics experiment, or doing research on a topic of special interest to me. Games feel very boring and unproductive to me even though I periodically attempt to check myself on this.

Augmented Reality could bridge the gap. Take a look at Pokemon Go or Geocaching as examples.

Pokemon Go was the last game I really played and it was so incredibly fresh and had an experience I will never experience again.. crowds of people outside doing the same thing with servers crashing.

How rare is that?

I stopped playing it years ago when they changed the gym system from a stacked tower to some system where your guys would lose health automatically just by being in the gym. Took the challenge out of it.. I was a completely solo player and enjoyed the challenge of taking on a fully stacked gym tower by myself.

Just as well. It did a number on my phone's battery with their poor coding (e.g. loading graphical assets over and over through an uncached encryption routine or something).