Every so often there have been discussions about “how you game”, but I want to ignore genre or era and instead get a feel for how we play in terms of what size/length of game makes up how much of our individual gaming diets. Here’s mine:
Maybe a few times a year I’ll play a bigger game which for me I’d consider 30+ hours, if it is a massive 100 hour behemoth I’ll generally only get try to tackle them once a year tops and generally once every few years.
I try to aim my commercial/not-indie consumption at more mid-length fair, probably every month I’m playing a 10-20 hour game and I’m generally not gonna be away from these length games for long. I do think a nice 7 or so hour long game is perhaps an ideal length and I’m always a bit glad when something I’m interested in ends up that length but I think due to wider industry factors they end up a bit longer than that so… again, those 10-20 hours games.
Beyond this I sprinkle a bunch of tiny games throughout there year, if I go a week without playing through a sub-hour game it means I’m either hooked by whatever bigger thing I’m playing or am just short on time. Still got a list of a few hundred PC games, majority of the itch variety, to pick from and I’ll often grab one when I have some time to kill a given night and if it is short will just load it up sight unseen. There’s also a bunch of few hour long indie mostly PC games that I’ll get to every few weeks more or less.
I also have various portable pick-away at games (generally number puzzlers) I slowly make my way through a few minutes at a time for months at a time whenever it’s like ten minutes before dinner and I’ve got nothing better to do.
I generally play zero endless or live service games.
at a point in my life where i just play like, a couple of big rpgs a year e.g baldur’s gate or smt and that’s it besides putting streets of rage 2 or rondo of blood on for an hour every so often
every time i play a game for longer than 5 or 10 minutes i feel like i’m wasting my time. i haven’t played anything in about a year tbh. I went HAM on SF6 for 2 months a year ago though.
only fire up destiny for new dungeons and campaigns, once every few weeks for two hours. i can ignore the grind and meta from atop my hoard of stuff now so it’s just like, the biannual new convoluted halo level
adventure games in five 1-2 hour chunks otherwise. if they don’t grab me in the first chunk i drop them (goodbye goodbye volcano high)
resident evil 7/village/shadows of rose fit this style nicely
alan wake II is my bar for 30ish hour AAA now so i expect to never play one again
oh and dipping in and out of like tetris and game and watch gallery 2 etc on the pocket but i don’t focus on them
I tend to have a big game going an RPG or something new. Then I have a side puzzle game and then Im consonantly cycling through random indies unless one really catches me. The amount of time I have to play games year to year varies wildly. When there were Grantuismos I wanted to played I have one of those going all the time. Ive been too broke to build a better PC or fix/replace my wheel setup so my car racing is way down.
Occasionally Ill fixate on a game and do a ton of work to get it running right. Like the time I emulated an obscure PS2 racing game just to remap the E-brake. I built a snatcher setup by acquiring and fixing a Sega CD, light gun and CRT back in college so I could complete all the Kojima games in the lead up to MGS4. Or when the mother 3 fan translation came out and I got a GBA player for my gamecube and a flash cart just to play it on my 32" crt.
When I do a big prep setup I play the game non-stop to completion.
Sometimes I check the hours my Steam friends have played a game to see whether I want to try it. This is one reason I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3, for example, and possibly never will even though I’d probably like it.
Other times I unwittingly get pulled into a very long game. (I first played SnowRunner with three friends in a multiplayer session. None of them have ever opened the game again after that and I didn’t particularly enjoy the experience myself but now I think my hours in that game have surpassed even Elden Ring and Let It Die.)
I’ve carefully avoided endless online games since Ultima Online, even if they look like fun. I like to try a lot of small/indie games and I never want one big game to crowd those out.
I am mostly limited by my hands now but for some reason find it important to keep up with a large variety of stuff.
I average about 45-55 full-ish playthroughs on a good year. Maybe 3 of those are like 65+ hours. Most of them are smaller indies or 10 hour meals. If I play any endless stuff it’s gonna be a fighting game but hoping to make it a shooter again some day.
The year is very lopsided though. One month I will juggle 4 titles in a dedicated fashion, the next I will play almost nothing.
narratively I top out at like 7-8 hours nowadays, call it low attention span or just being disappointed by games too often, and usually games I can play with my significant other spectating. otherwise prefer non narrative games that are sims/simcades, or esports - e.g. in the past few years been obsessed with cricket 22, forza horizon 4, art of rally, some time in assetto corsa and EA WRC, Halo mcc achievements; with some playthrus of stuff like deaths door, a short hike, block’hood, etc. been building out a small sim rig so hopefully more car sims going forward
I find plot-wise many games kinda suck for the time you invest vs. other art forms, and I’d rather learn a real skill (piano etc) than learn most game mechanics, so it puts me in a weird place for most games in that they feel time wastey. only really look for the most unique stuff.
My “I have an hour to kill” game is FF14. I play it like other people play like sudoku or picross or something.
The Gloomhaven Boys get another 3-4 hours a week. We’ve played actual vidcons (DivOS2, BG3) but I dunno if Tabletop Simulator counts, lol.
I have another group I play sporadic coop with. We played a lot of Helldivers 2 for instance. Haven’t done much lately, maybe Space Marine 2 will grab us for a while.
Then I usually have a single player game from my deliberately short backlog I’m picking away at in between. Usually I end up posting something about them when I’m done. Right now it’s F.I.S.T.: Forged In Shadow Torch, the stupidest named game ever (it’s machine translated from Chinese, so).
i generally am playing at any given time one braindead farm game and one numbers go up game and that’s it. “knowing about interesting video games” is a fun game but i mostly don’t actually really play anything.
other than blog research, i mostly play arcade and arcade-style games. i play a yakuza every year or two, though. and i’ll often dip into rpgs that i can handheld emulate, but i rarely finish them.
i guess i also, on occasion, try a triple-a type game in the interest of fairness. it pretty much always just confirms my prejudices, though.
srsly, i can go weeks, if not 2-3 months w/o any gaming, and mostly turn on the XB4 or PS5 to download new patches… for HTPC, same thing, but sometimes dip into one game which can be played without major time investment.
Recent examples include We Katamari, Inscryption(sp?), Baba=U, Tin Hearts
During Fall/Winter season, i end up playing a lot more medium-sized games, i.e. a few dungeons in FFCC, a few levels in EDF[newest Installment], a few races in Forza 8, a few C&C Red Alert maps — something ranging from half an hour to two hours.
Rare drops territory:
Every 1-2 years a game manages to pique my interest, and then it’s on — 40,50 hours in 2-3 weeks.
EDGEiest of edge-cases:
If it is tri-Ace, I romp through the game like there’s no tomorrow, breaking and bending the systems to my will — it’s maybe the most satisfying gaming experience of the last decade or so when that happens.
Star Ocean 5 topic should be around somewhere here, had so, so much fun with the emotes in that game
final fantasy 14. always grinding all the time for cheevos
neopets/nintendo ds rpgs/shit ive stolen on the second monitor if the grinds are really monotonous or if im just idling so people can see my wonderful glams
ive always flitted around based on my fixations at the moment like i get really into a specific series or genre or even just a general vibe (eg. when i got hooked on playing games that are fun/beneficial to draw maps for) and go ham on it until my attention shifts elsewhere. this is how i take in a lot of media. In that context the individual lengths of games are kinda secondary. ill play something 50+ hours long if im still vibing with it, but im just as apt to suddenly drop it if something else distracts me for long enough lol
i do usually have a replay oriented/sandboxy game im fucking with separately. like recently ive alternated playing thru N64 games i used to rent with taking runs at Enter the Gungeon. before that i was mapping dungeon crawlers while screwing around in Terraria etc.
Katamari, Inscryption(sp?), Baba=U, Tin Hearts