Hey, squiders! First week of the new year is down. How has it been for you so far?
I’ve done okay, though I’ve been focusing on the easy things first.
(Also, as I think I told you, I made a resolution to read a book off my TBR lists once a month. I’ve ended up with three books, however, because I kept looking them up at the library and they weren’t available. So I put a couple of holds on stuff and eventually found a book that was available.
And then, of course, the holds came in.)
You know what’s easy? Playing video games. In theory.
Here’s the deal with video games. I am a binge gamer with obsessive tendencies. It is really hard for me to play, oh, an hour, and then go do something else. I tend to play several hours in a go, have a hard time refocusing onto something else, and, if left to my own devices, I will do this for a week or so and then wander off and not touch that or another game for months.
This isn’t true of all games. Multiplayer games I can normally play for an hour or two and be good for the day, and I can do that several days in a row and on and off. I think it’s because my brain categorizes those games as socialization or spending time with friends or something, something that separates them from video games as a whole.
Like, when I and everyone else in the world was super into Among Us last year this time, I wasn’t playing five hours of AU in a day. I’d play an hour and a half on average and then I was done. When I play AU these days–admittedly a lot less than I was–that still seems to hold. It might also be because multiplayer games tend to be fairly repetitive so they don’t lend themselves to repetition aside from competing against other people.
The other exception is dancing games. I love dancing games. I am good at dancing games. I used to Dance Dance Revolution all the time back in the day, and these days I play Just Dance on the Switch (or the Wii) before it. I think if you played six hours of Just Dance in a go you’d probably die. I average about 45 minutes, maybe an hour.
But, anyway, I said to myself that I should get the video game goal going. I think, maybe, my thought was I’d start a game and then play it on and off through the month, apparently forgetting the last several decades of evidence about how I actually play games.
The first thing I tried is called Spellcaster University. I got it for free through Amazon Gaming, which I didn’t realize was a thing (apparently it comes free with your Prime membership). It’s your fairly standard build and maintain sort of tycoon, in this case a magic school that gets destroyed every ten years when the dark lord rises up. I played, oh, four years of the first school on the first, then played some more yesterday, where I spent like six hours finishing off that first school and then two more (and had just started the fourth when I stopped for the day). Depending on the students’ training they can get different jobs when they graduate, and I think those bonuses must stack in between schools, because I feel like I got way more powerful a lot faster this last school, to the point was I was starting to be able to fight against the dark lord to some extent.
There’s the binge gaming kicking in again.
Over Wednesday and Thursday this week I also played a choose your own adventure visual novel based off of Hamlet called To Be or Not to Be. It was pretty fun–I especially enjoyed some of the Ophelia paths–but the base game got boring pretty quickly. I found a guide that told me how to unlock all the achievements and did that, then found one that explained how to unlock the artwork (my favorite piece being the ghost of Hamlet’s dad making friends with the sea creatures), but then I realized there were 100 art pieces and that my time would be better spent making magic schools, so I called that game done and moved it into my Completed section on Steam.
So I count the goal done for the month. I started two new games and beat one of them, and I’ve definitely played five hours.
Probably should work on figuring out how NOT to binge game. I had honestly forgotten that was a thing I did, since most of what I’ve played in the last year and a half is either Among Us or Just Dance. I did play a great horror adventure game over the summer called Oxenfree, and I didn’t binge that either. Wonder why not?
Maybe it’s just tycoons and MMORPGs I binge, and if I can stay away from those, I’ll be fine.
Things to ponder.
Thoughts, squiders? About games (and how to stop playing them at appropriate times)? Or resolutions?
