Wish we could turn back time to the good old days, when our Mama sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out – Stressed Out by Twenty One Pilots

I have been playing video games as one of my main forms of entertainment and relaxation for over 25 years, and in that time, my preference in video games have changed. My favorite games for PSX and PS2 are quite different than my favorites on Xbox360 – and, up until the last year or so, I just attributed that to getting older. It’s normal for an 8 year old to enjoy ratchet and clank, and a 14 year old to enjoy Call of Duty (wow, that sounds super bad in hindsight!). But what I’ve realized is that my video game interests are entirely dictated by the environment that I am in at the time. When I got into college and had more free time than I knew what to do with I played Elder Scrolls Online for nearly a hundred hours a week – but when I was studying for finals and taking harder level chemistry classes, I stuck to wolfenstein time trials. The funny thing is that this was not a conscientious decision – I just felt anxious playing certain games that required more time than I had.  In this article I hope that by opening myself up for analysis I can help you better understand where video games fit into your own lives and schedules, because ultimately we should be playing video games because we want to, not because we feel we need to.

Part 1: Priorities

I am not a planner. Never have been, probably never will be. I cannot make a plan and stick with it – even if it is just for a few days ahead. Funnily enough, this is why I loved school so much – I didn’t have to plan a thing! I just got to strap in to the metaphorical roller coaster and ride it to the end and go back home for the day. This meant that when I got home I felt like I accomplished something – survived the harrowing day and earned a reward! And that reward 9 days out of 10 was to mindlessly play video games until my parents told me to stop. But this mindset doesn’t work as an adult, in fact, this is one of the most detrimental enemies to productivity. We must have priorities and goals and by accomplishing these things we will feel like we earned the ability to relax and get sucked away into a video game. I struggle with playing video games like God of War 2018 or Metro Last Light or Ghost of Tsushima due to not being fully engrossed in the gameplay – and that is caused, more often than not, by an inkling feeling of guilt of not earning the relaxation time. If you find yourself pulled more and more to ‘multitasking games’ or quick 20-30 minute gaming sessions, perhaps you need to create a schedule in which playing games is an included and earned part of the day/ week.

Part 2: Time =\= Value

I will most likely end up writing a whole article on the ‘min/maxing mentality’ but for now I’ll just say this – you do not need to justify your time spent playing video games or any other hobby. For some of you, this might sound ridiculous – it’s my time, why should I feel the need to justify it to anyone? But let me give you a scenario and see what you think – you get home from working an 8-5, grab some McDonald’s and throw on YouTube. You finish your dinner, finish the video, and then decide to hop on Warzone or Fortnite or whatever the newest ‘persistently online limited time cash shop’ game is. You play 3 or 4 games, don’t level up, don’t unlock anything, and feel like garbage. So you go to the shop, see a skin that you like and tell yourself “oh, that’s online X amount of dollars, I make that in an hour” and you buy it. Now you feel like you earned something for the night and can go to bed happy. Notice in that scenario I never mentioned the notion of having to justify your time to someone else. By buying a skin, or spending money on a game at all, you are rewarding yourself for your time spent playing the game when the irony is that the game itself should be the one rewarding you. Good video games respect your time and your money. I used to spend obscene amounts of money on Fortnite and one day I realized the only reason I spent money on skins was because the damned game took so long to unlock anything that I felt like I was wasting my time. So I would spend money to reward myself for the time – to justify to myself that my time investment earned me something. But then I stopped playing Fortnite and moved on to games that rewarded my time with new cool unlocks, games like Assassin’s Creed or Dark Souls. And it’s easy to get in the headspace where you’ve spent so much time playing a game that dropping it and moving on feels like a break up, but I promise you that video games should not feel like a committed relationship – they should be relaxing and rewarding. 

3: Yin and Yang

Have you ever heard someone make the claim that ‘teachers love teaching kids but don’t want children?’ The crux of this argument is that doing something for work does not necessarily mean that you want to do it for leisure time too. Similarly, there is a phenomenon I have observed in myself that relates to video games – the harder my day to day (whether that be work, school, relationships, etc) the less brain power and thought I want to put into a video game. Conversely, when life is easy and I’m on autopilot, I love video games that require me to think and use strategy. This goes back to my comment at the beginning of this article in regards to my college experience – college was fairly easy for me, and I can prove this by the sheer amount of time I put into MMO’s during those years. MMO’s are, by definition, a chore. They are meant to be the most drug-out, monotonous, slog of a game imaginable to make you play them every waking hour for the rest of their lifespan. But the moment that life got hard, I had no more energy for that. Why would I want to do chores on a video game when I do them all day? There have been plenty of video games that I feel like I should have loved over the years that probably just came out at the wrong time. Listen to your gut and move on from a game if it doesn’t click – because you might just be too stressed or busy to justify that type of game right now. 

Part 4: Break the Trend

At the time of writing this article, Metal Gear Solid Snake Eater Delta has just come out. Ghost of Yotei is due out within the next few weeks. Silksong was released a few days ago. And you know what I’ve been playing for the last month straight? Old School RuneScape. One of the best things I ever did for my enjoyment of video games was to take a few month break from the new hotness and revisit my favorite games. Video gaming has become so mainstream and so in your face that we feel compelled to a least try out the video games that everyone is talking about. However, all this does is cost you money and contribute to a never ending backlog. Don’t go buy video games the week they come out – and sure as hell don’t preorder them. Historically speaking, almost all video games that are AAA titles will receive 10 updates within the first year fixing bugs, and a game of the year edition within the first two. Will I enjoy MGS Delta less in a year’s time? What about 2? The answer is and always will be, no. Play the games you want to play when you want to play them because you want to play them: don’t buy into fear of missing out. 

Part 5: The End? 

If you’ve made it this far I thank you for sticking around and I sincerely hope that I aided in your journey to enjoying video games. And even better yet, I hope that you learned something about yourself that you can apply to other parts of your life – maybe learning a new language or being a better friend or partner. Or maybe I’ve just convinced you to take a break from GTA5 or Destiny 2 or Fortnite to go a try a new game. And those of you more astute than normal might be asking “why is it labelled ‘the end?’ and not just ‘the end’ or something?” And the answer is – it’s not the end. I’m making new self reflections daily. Through all of this I don’t claim to understand everything when it comes to how to enjoy video games again. Hell, I’m still just playing OSRS. Maybe I’ll go give Metro Last Light another chance.