There are certain challenges in life that, in reflection, I have spent way too much time and energy on over the course of my life. Losing weight, for example. Literally my whole life I’ve fretted about getting in better shape. So far it hasn’t happened and at this point probably never will. I should accept that I’m always going to be a large person in terms of BMI, but as long as I am reasonably active and otherwise healthy I should just stop worrying about it.
Another example and the one I’m actually here to talk about is quitting games. Or not quitting them. Or fretting about whether I should quit them. For the LONGEST time I never finished any games and always felt some weird low-key guilt over that. Back in the day there was at least some logic behind that guilt. I’d spend $50 or $60 on a game and play it for 3 hours and drift away. That’s just wasting money and I’ve never been a rich person who can afford to ‘throw away’ money like that.
These days, though, games are SO cheap. Or they can be, if you are a bit patient. Steam sales, Humble Bundles, free games from the Epic store, Game Pass, PS Plus, Nintendo Online. I probably have over a thousand games, hundreds of which I’ve never played, most of which I got for next to nothing. I have not invested significant $$ in these games. The only currency in play here is time.
Anyway, at some point I decided I “should” finish more games. And I did start finishing more. But did that lead to gaming being a more enjoyable hobby? In retrospect, no. It just made gaming feel a little bit more like a chore. I want to play Game B, but I “have” to finish Game A first. And by the time I finish Game A, Game C and Game D, both ‘must-plays’ in my mind, have released. I just get further and further behind in my ‘want to play’ queue.
Last night the algorithm popped this video in front of my eyes:
For those who don’t want to watch, it’s about Sunk Cost Fallacy. TLDR: You’ve spent 50 hours in a game and you’re not finding it much fun but since you’ve already invested those 50 hours you feel like they’ll be ‘wasted’ if you don’t finish the game. But of course those hours are gone no matter what you do and pushing through the final 20 hours to finish is just ‘wasting’ more hours. That’s my bad summary but it’s a pretty interesting video, IMO.
Anyway I saw myself over and over again in this video. SO many times I’ve started a game, found it to be really interesting at first and then 10 or 20 or 40 hours in it all starts feeling like I’m doing the same thing over and over and just kind of going through the motions to get to the end so I can say I finished. SOMETIMES I want to get to the end jsut because the narrative has me hooked so I ‘push through’ to get that reward. That’s not the kind of situation I’m talking about.
I’m talking about a game I’m pushing to finish not because I really care about the story or anything, but simply because I feel like I ‘should’ finish or I want to finish just so I can say I finished. This situation is way more common for me (wouldn’t it be great if more games had narratives so compelling you’d want to finish just to see how they end?).
Yesterday I wrote a post about a handful of games I’ve been playing. I didn’t publish because I had to go and take screenshots for it. After watching the above video, I just deleted the post.
Why? Because I realized something about myself. Once I post about a game it becomes a Project that should be completed. It’s silly! No one cares! No one comes back to get a progress report on how it’s going in Kena: Bridge of Spirits. If I write a second or third post about it then maybe folks read it but if I never mention the game again… will anyone notice, and if they do will they care? Very doubtful.
But inside my brain? Posting about what I’m playing feels like I’m committing to it. Now if I don’t both finish the game AND write a post announcing that I’ve finished it, I have Failed in some way. I say again: it’s SILLY. Just not so sure how to turn that off. This is yet one more brain-tweak I’m working on. Of the three games I mentioned in the deleted post, all were initially enjoyable, but I’ve kind of lost interest in two of them already. I enjoyed my time with them right up to the point where I didn’t. What point is there in pressing forward if I’m not having fun!?
In terms of solving the problem, I just have to give myself permission to go back to being a “game grazer” and playing whatever the f I want to play whenever I sit down to play a game. If I play that game for 1 session or 1000 sessions doesn’t matter. What matters is whether I’m enjoying myself. As long as I don’t go back to spending $60 for a brand new game and then not playing it (because that IS wasting money I can’t afford to waste) then it doesn’t matter how long I play for.
I write all my posts but I sometimes ask ChatGPT to give me feedback before I publish in case I’m too close to the topic or maybe I’ve repeated myself or whatever. This time it said something that really resonated with me: “we've gotten extremely good at turning leisure into performance.” Sometimes AI can make mistakes, but I don’t think it did this time. All the ways we track and count and segment and reward ourselves for doing our leisure activities can start to become the reason for doing the activities when we probably should be doing leisure activities because we enjoy them.
In terms of blogging, it’s a bit more of a real problem. If I only post about games I’ve finished… I won’t have many posts! Two or three a year maybe? I have to get past the silly assumption that if I post about a game that I’m somehow committing to finishing it and that readers will think less of me if I don’t because again, intellectually I know no one cares a lick if I finish or not. Now it might be interesting to circle back and talk about why I lost interest. That actually might be illuminating. My post on why I stopped playing Hell Is Us might be a good example of what that would look like.
So my Action Item after writing this post is: stop treating game posts as progress reports. This is more an “inner voice” change than an actual content change. I need to remind myself that writing about a game is not committing to that game. And more generally to try to get back to treating leisure activities as leisure, not as “content fodder” and not as something that has to be ‘productive.’
Does anyone else struggle with this and if so, do you have coping mechanisms? Or is this just my brain striving to manufacture problems that don’t really exist — which I’m finally realizing is one of the ‘core’ issues I have in terms of mental well-being. There’s that bigger discussion to be had concerning how we maybe over-share things and gamify everything so we can assign values to everything we do… but I won’t get into that today (or ever, probably)!
[Top image is a screenshot of the first page of “My Library” from GeForce Now. In that service alone I have 550 games waiting to be played. That’s without factoring in PlayStation, Xbox Console and Switch games, or games in my Epic Gamestore library, or games in GOG or Steam that aren’t supported on GeForce Now. Point is, I don’t think I’ll run out of things to play any time soon!]
