The Haul
I purchased a number of games over the holiday break:
- My Time at Sandrock
- Dave the Diver
- Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands: Chaotic Edition
- Alan Wake 2
- Dead Island 2: Gold Edition
The (potentially) interesting thing is how four of them were from the Epic store and only one from Steam. As it turns out, throwing an additional 33% discount on top of the holiday sale discount is enough to get me to switch storefronts. Well, “switch storefronts,” with air-quotes. And, shit, I would’ve done it for like a $5 discount; I’m a cheap date. I do fully anticipate Epic to eventually stop with the free games and outrageous deals because they’re just hemorrhaging money, but for now I’ll soak up as much as I can and just assume them going bankrupt won’t lose my library.
I started writing about why I chose the five games above and not any of the other ones on my wishlist(s), but it started to feel a bit weird. Which has hardly ever stopped me before, mind you.
I dunno. My inclination to drop a game when it becomes less fun than something else I could be playing, is starting to run into guilt of a veritable landfill of half-chewed titles. I shouldn’t care – there is no one keeping score at home – but I’m also thinking about how silly it gets when talking about games to other human beings. “Oh, yeah, Baldur’s Gate 3 is amazing. I got 61 hours into Act 1 and then… stopped playing. Since August.” “Yep, 120+ hours in Cyberpunk 2077. Never finished.” “Elden Ring was beautiful, I agree. About 30 hours in, but haven’t touched it in 6 months.” WTF, mate?
Don’t get me wrong, there are still titles I’m very interested in that will be releasing in 2024. But at some point I hit a critical mass of straw such that my cognitive back can no longer sustain the dissonance. I need to get my shit together. Or abandoned shit. It’s getting a little ridiculous.
Welcome to 2024.
Posted on January 5, 2024, in Commentary and tagged Epic Sale, Haul, Spark Joy, What Am I Doing With My Life?. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
In An Age 
Yeah, the recent firehose of game releases has really done a number on the ‘Steam backlog’ phenomenon.
I’ve long accepted that the pleasure of buying the game, the transient excitement at the eventual prospect of playing it, and then the soft contentment of knowing I can play it when the elusive (sometimes hypothetical) mood strikes is like… three-quarters of what I spend the gaming money on.
But that’s descriptivist cope. It’d be interesting to understand why. Best I can do is: the effort to recapture the state of flow I had experienced while playing becomes irksome after a short break and only increases with the passage of time thereafter. Meanwhile, the effort of achieving the same state of flow with a new game is midwived by the novelty itself.
I think both the quality and complexity of the game and the time previously invested actually exacerbate the problem because there’s more to remember, feel, and understand in order to really have your head in it. And because some of us are perfectionists/optimisers, half-arsing it doesn’t satisfy. And, growing older, we a) don’t care as much as we used to in the first place; b) have to endure shorter intervals of gaming time and more interruptions on account of other commitments; and c) might be slightly slower on the re-uptake.
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Ha, I was trying to keep things shorter, but now I’m compelled to share a similar thought process.
For me, most of my game purchases are “defensive” in nature. I have moods I go through, wherein I will get an overpowering desire to play either a specific game, or a specific genre of game. For example, a few weeks ago, it was My Time at Sandrock. I didn’t know at the time that it would be Sandrock, although it had been on my radar. But after feeling like playing a life/farm sim, I started playing Coral Island. The mood then triggered. I persisted playing Coral Island instead, because the Thanksgiving sale had already been completed, and my deep-seated desire to not “waste” money is stronger than my moods. But… it was no longer fun. Because I wanted to play something else.
And that’s the rub of it all. I have practically infinite alternatives at my disposal, but during these moods, nothing else satisfies. In fact, I realize that whatever novelty and goodness inherent to them would be wasted; it would be like watching a film in a room full of people talking.
It’s some epic #FirstWorldProblems, but it is what it is.
Of course, the new wrinkle is the whole “stop playing when you stop having fun” addendum. Which is rational by itself, but becoming a bit problematic within the larger framework.
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Most of the fun of a game is discovering it and learning – at least for me. There are very few games that I have finished, and I still love new games.
My ideal game length is 10-20h, depending on how much new things the game can throw at me.
The few games with more played time than that are the puzzle one : either against the game ( factorio, cities skyline, installing mods on Skyrim,…) or against other human ( TF2 as engineer, World of Tanks, …)
The ‘story’ games are far more difficult to play for a long time. The story is not strong enough to make me play for the equivalent of a 5 seasons series on Netflix, and the gameplay is also too much stable over time.
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I very much agree. The admonishment of “optimizing the fun out of the game” always felt so strange – the process of optimizing is the fun part! Looking at skill trees and planning routes; picking up that new piece of gear and what sort of combos you can now perform; character progression, basically. Once your character is “done,” the rest of the game is performative. Who gets excited about the endgame in Civilization?
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