My Life In Gaming Live Streams, which is just about the only entertainment I consume anymore, brought up an excellent point that has been rolling around in my head. They were talking reasonably about life expectancy and life experience.
My life expectancy is frankly, not great. While I play a lot of video games, I do have a limited time to play them now adays. I do have physical records I can go back in check, but reasonably let’s say I play 2 50+ hour games a year. I figure I got about 19 games left (Rudie is seen slapping his own stomach.) I gotta start planning that out! It ain’t gonna be this copy of Witcher 3 that I will see to the end credits. Glad I didn’t buy the DLC for that ever, I played that thing for like 35 minutes.
I’m not talking about this with morbidity, though I am being realistic. I don’t got time for a lot of big games anymore. I’ll try that Multiplayer Elden Ring thing. Will I ever play DQXI? At least one of the 19 is Final Fantasy Seven R Three. That’s a certainty. And Kingdom Hearts 4. And I suppose, at least somewhat, Final Fantasy SevenTeen. What can I say I am a Square mark. For their big giant huge games. I certainly haven’t touched a Star Ocean or a Various Daylife.
This same mentality keeps me away from TV Shows. I like movies because they are two hours long and tell a full story. TV Shows, you better enjoy that journey kid!!!
I just thought about it yesterday. I’m 38 now. I’ve accepted that my life destiny is to either die or become Britta Food4Dogs the JRPG playing elder, so I figure I have about 300+ big games left on average and can still reasonably waste some of it
I’ve made peace with the idea that I will probably only ever play one Fromsoft game to completion (Likely Bloodborne). I’m too old and impatient to beat my head against skill checks.
Other than that at this point I want to go for breadth over depth. No time to play every game in a series, for me. I’ve missed the boat on the majority of Final Fantasy, and I am probably not going to try to address that, the games are too long.
Whereas I’ve played many smaller games of late, in truth I get far more out of longer games than shorter ones anymore as a rule, just because I can sink into them. The truth is, I far prefer a game in which I can get lost. But also I feel better knowing it’s game time and just booting up the game rather than scrolling through my collection trying to choose what to play next, which wastes more time.
Fight games feel like the big commitment for me but I also find they’re the ones I enjoy the most. Committing to learning a system is more rewarding than slogging through large RPGs/open worlds.
Honestly life expectancy is one thing but I find that the use of my hands is probably the bigger limit I’m going to eventually face. Even if we all lived to our maximum life expectancy we probably won’t be able to play the same range of games as much. Action games basically hate hands. I may end up playing turn based games by default whether I like it or not. Hoping to play as many action games as I can in the next six years.
Maybe I will too, who knows, but I’m a lot less enthusiastic about it than I was 15 years ago so I expect a similar rate of diminishing interest over the next 15
