It's even sadder - I used to be able to play computer games for hours offline, now I get about five minutes into even the ones WITH on offline mode, and I'm grabbing for a wiki or other reference. Ah, some of it is just getting old.
I think some of it is just not having oodles of free time to figure it out on your own. When I was young I would just keep trying things till I figured out the game, my time wasn't worth much or at least I didn't value it highly. Nowadays I don't want to spend 1-3 hours figuring something frustrating that's blocking my progress. The "rush" I get from solving it on my own does not make up for the time lost. Also I feel like games made today almost expect you will need the wiki/guide to figure out certain things. Or at least I often think "How the heck was I supposed to figure that out?" when reading the wiki for some aspect of a game I'm stuck on.
So.. it's an adult strategy for playing video games to extract a candy coated "win." We are all either overgrown children and always will be, or something has gone drastically wrong in the schools.
That latter part is certainly true, only a few games "offhand" even really try to work "wiki-free" (Factorio is perhaps the best here, but Minecraft is trying).
