There are a lot of great games out there, with more coming all the time. There are more that I want to play than I have time to play; there just aren’t enough hours in my days, even though gaming is my only real hobby. I’m sure the same could be said about other media that folks are passionate about, whether that is books or movies or heck, even online content. In some ways it’s a good problem to have — at least it’s better than the opposite problem: not having enough content to keep you entertained.
But I struggle with it because I am constantly sliding towards making gaming a kind of a second job. I feel pressure to finish the game I’m playing because I really want to get to the next game I want to play, so there are times when I play because I feel like I “should” or I “have to” in order to get the current game done. I have learned that if I put a game aside I’ll at best have to start over when I come back to it, and at worst I’ll never come back to it.
The knock-on effect of too many desirable games is that I’m never comfortable stopping to smell the roses (even though I am the World’s Slowest Gamer) in big games.
This all came into focus the other day when Oblivion Remastered dropped. I got through the tutorial and started roaming around, and soon enough got caught up in some side activities. I was having fun, at least at first. But by the end of the first day of playing I was already scolding myself for not getting on with it and moving the main quest forward. In a game like Oblivion I really think powering through the main quest is kind of defeating the purpose of playing, no? What my heart thinks I SHOULD be doing is just experiencing things. Putter around. Join a guild, explore a new area, talk to everyone to build up my speechcraft. Learn to pick pocket. Then learn to flee from the guards. Just LIVE in the world and enjoy it. Immerse myself in there. Lose myself in Tamriel.
But I just can’t seem to find that gaming ‘flow’ state for this kind of thing very often these days. I can’t ignore the fact that another game I want to play is coming out tomorrow or next week and already I’m super backlogged.
It struck me that this is why I’ve drifted away from MMOs, too. In Ye Olden Days I’d log in and just be in a virtual world for hours at a time without a care in the world. These days when I dabble in an MMO, at the end of a session I think about the time I spent, and what I got accomplished, and make a value judgement on whether or not that play session had been “worth it”. Usually the answer is no.
At least part of this very #FirstWorldProblem is Game Pass and Playstation Plus. Having games constantly being “given” to you (in quotes because of course the sub isn’t free) for a fixed but not infinite period of time is mostly a blessing, but also a little bit of a curse. When I have to open my wallet to play the next enticing game, I’m much more critical of what is worth my time. Having games constantly get dropped into my lap makes them hard to resist, particularly since I know if I don’t play now, that game might leave the service.
There’s no real point to this post…sometimes it just helps me organize my thoughts by writing them down. I don’t know how to re-condition myself to just ‘let go’ of some titles so I can comfortably wile away the hours in a given game for weeks or months. I mean sometimes a game just hits right and does push everything to the side for hundreds of hours: Genshin Impact, Snow Runner and Fallout 76 all have done it in the past couple years. Maybe that is what this post is about… convincing myself to go find a game where I just can’t RESIST spending time in it. (Death Stranding 2 soon, please??!).
The one practical thing I’ve been doing is uninstalling stuff from my consoles. Just not seeing 100 games installed helps a little. I winnow things down and get rid of the “Hmm, this could be interesting” stuff and I only leave the “I know this is a solid game” titles. But there are still a bunch to pick from!
I’d be curious to know if anyone else struggles with this situation and if you’ve found any coping mechanisms that help.
Yes and no is the answer in my case. Yes, in that I certainly have far too many games on my mental “should play” list than I have any realistic chance of even trying, let alone making significannt progress in, but No in that I’m currently in a mental state where gaming is much further down the pecking order for me than it has been for more than twenty years. My real problem just now is maintaining enough interest to play games at all and it is partly because of that same “what could I be doing with this time if I wasn’t spending it playing a game?” feeling, with the answer often being “something I’d both enjoy more and have something to show for it at the end”.
It’s tempting to see this as the inevitable result of far too long spent playing games already. It was a phase and a long one but I’m finally growing out of it. Tempting, but wrong. I still want to playthe games just as much but now I want to do other things even more. Gaming hasn’t gone down, other thihngs have come up. And I do think this is a phase, as I imagine it will be for you. It does just take that one game to click and suddenly it becomes all you want to do. The thing so many people seem to do and which makes them so jaded and disatisfied is to go looking for that one game, which is not how it works. The game picks you, you don’t pick the game.
“The game picks you, you don’t pick the game.”
That is a perfect quote, right there. You are absolutely right. Maybe I just need to ‘graze’ the gaming field until a new title picks me!
I’m a broken record, but until you play it, I’m going to harp on it. 🙂 Baldur’s Gate 3. Play as Tav, play again as Dark Urge, play again as one (or many) of the origin characters – be good, be evil, be ambivilant – the game is different every play through and well worth your time. All other games are meh. My two cents.
It’s on my list of games I want to get to!
I’ve played Oblivion (original, haven’t picked up remastered yet) for 100’s of hours, and never once finished the main story quest. Actually– same for Skyrim.
So no, I haven’t quite had the same experience. For better or worse (and I flip flop back and forth on which I believe), I don’t put a lot of stock in finishing a game for the sake of having done so. I’ve long subscribed to what Krikket once articulated perfectly of ‘Playing to Satisfaction’, and then stopping, whether that was at the end of the game or not.
That said… There are times, with certain games, where I’ve enjoyed them enough to invest a lot of hours into them, and they have a strong narrative that I do want to finish, where at a certain point I no longer engage with any side content and just beeline my way through to the end. For Witcher 3 this happened near the end of both the main campaign, and about midway to perhaps 2/3rds of the way through the final expansion.
So I guess actually I do somewhat experience what you’re talking about, but perhaps less often.
I used to NEVER finish games, then I made a pledge to myself to do better, and I kind of went too far in the other direction to where I’d finish a game even if I wasn’t having any fun. I’m more in the middle now but still get a little hung up on it.
Like Veilguard right now. It’s OK. I don’t LOVE it but I think I like it more than most. That said, if I finished it today I’d be fine with that, and I think I still have lots to go. So it falls into this “Good enough to keep playing it, but not good enough that I’m not even thinking about other games” category which is kind of spot on in my oddly uncomfortable zone. 🙂
Do I over-think things, or what!!?! LOL!