As many others here, I have accumulated a bit of a “backlog” over the years, consisting of games that were cheap to pick up on sale, games that I have/had general interest in, or new game releases. Whenever a new game came out, I felt kind of urged to play the new game, drop everything else, and quite often end up not picking up the “abandoned” games again.
Sometime last year, when money was a bit tight, I just started playing games I already had instead of worrying about keeping up with new game releases, and it’s been really liberating. I finished Mass Effect 1-3 over a combined ~100h, I platinumed Sekiro, Bloodborne, and started Dark Souls and Elden Ring, I found my love for Frostpunk and have been blasting that for the past months. I’m just having a great time overall.
I think a good help in that regard was a comment I read on the rexxit equivalent of this community where they proposed to see games as countries and giving them a shot is like coming there to visit: visiting a country is cool, but you don’t have stay there indefinitely to have a good time; it’s always fine to leave the country and go visit another, and not seeing everything the country has to offer does not worsen your experience there.
I don’t stress about picking something back up again after having a good time with it and looking for something else to play. I don’t stress about new releases (too much - Diablo 4 is currently pretty difficult to stay away from for me lol) because the game won’t vanish magically if I check it out a week later, several months later, a year later. I just play whatever I feel like playing and whenever I feel like playing it. If I end up deleting something off the console - that’s fine. There’s always something else to play.
Not really sure what my point is, really, but felt inclined to get the ball rolling in this community. I like the idea of being a patient gamer a lot, and it’s helped me enjoy games a lot more than I used to, so I wanted to contribute too and be a more active part of the “movement”.
Thanks to everyone who’s part of the community and who’s been promoting good vibes!
Completely agree with your comments.
Gamer are a form of entertainment, we don’t have to force them. Enjoy them when you can and leave them when you can’t. You can always come back to a game you stopped playing, and even if you don’t, it doesn’t matter, just move on to the next one.
I guess it is kind of implied that you have to finish a game once you start playing it. At least this was the case for me because I felt like I didn’t get my money’s worth out of it if I didn’t finish it. But you’re completely right.
With age, I am realizing that time is just as important a commodity as money, if not much more.
So, if I am not enjoying a 50 hours games, dropping it at 10 hours is much better than spending 40 more hours of non-enjoyment. Previously, I would try to finish it, no matter how much I didn’t like it, but now it feels like sunk-cost fallacy. Throwing away good money after bad (except time, instead of money)