Battling the to-play pile
Froggy sticks a poster up on the wall by the front entrance to the Arena. It shows a picture of a gamer about to be buried by a teetering pile of unplayed games. In clear type the poster enquires of readers:
Do you have more games than time to play them?
Do you find it difficult to finish the games you begin?
Does the lure of the new and shiny always pull you away from the here and now?
Come to room 307 (formerly the lion’s den) in the Arena and meet other sufferers! Swap tips! Get support! Learn ways to deal with your problem! Cry on supportive shoulders!(*)
*Please note that crying on supportive shoulders is a metaphor. Anyone actually attempting to blub all over another patron will be escorted to the exit by our friendly security agents.
Froggy hurries away to make sure the slaves have got room 307 ready for use. It wouldn’t do to have traces of the lion incident remaining …
My name is frogbeastegg and I have a problem. I’ve got loads of unfinished games. Worse, I own loads of games I haven’t tried yet. There are more games I want to get. I’ve got thousands of hours worth of gameplay sat waiting for me.
Since the start of this year I have been trying to tackle this problem. I’m trying to reform. It’s been hard. It’s working, slowly. I’m seeing results, enjoying my gaming time more, and feeling less like an out of control amphibian pinwheel of a gamer. There’s still a long way to go.
I know I’m not alone in this here at the org (Xiahou!) so I thought it might be interesting to start a topic, see what people have to say.
To get things started here’s the things I’ve found to be helpful.
Play a small number of games at once!
Hopping around between a mass of games gets you nowhere, take it from a frog who played that way for years. Better to put 10 hours into one game than 1 hour into 10. Bluntly put this will get you completing games. The obvious reason for this is that you will progress further, faster. The less obvious reason is that because the experience is more concentrated you will often find yourself enjoying the game more, and won’t have problems with being unable to remember what you were doing or finding your skills have rusted.
I play 1 epic, 1 portable, and 1 other game at any one time.
Epic is any game which takes 40 or more hours to complete. Only one to be in progress at any time; playing more than one behemoth of a game is a bad idea. Working away at the same pair of titles for months gets boring.
Portable is any game on the DS, PSP, or GBA. Except in rare circumstances there should not be two portable games on the go at the same time; unless you begin to play these titles during ‘normal’ gaming time then you’ll find you get nowhere fast. These games tend to be played for short periods at random times, e.g. during the lunch break at work. When I do play a portable game at home it’s almost always a big, chunky game in its own right, and so needs a fair bit of time.
Other can be anything, but you should exercise sense. Typically my other is a shortish game, or a single campaign in one of those games which you can’t really finish (e.g Civ 4, TW). Unless you like to drown yourself in same, same, same you should pick a game which is different to your epic and portable. Some people can enjoy playing 3 different varieties of JRPGs. Most can’t, and certainly not me.
Adjust this to suit your needs. Maybe you don’t have a portable system, or maybe you’ll do better with only one game at once.
Aim to finish whatever game you start, but define ‘finish’ as something reasonable for yourself.
This applies heavily to some games but not at all to others. In a game with a lot of sidequests you could choose merely to follow the main plot from beginning to end and call that finished. Alternately you could go for 100% completion and only consider it finished then. Perhaps a balance between the two: you’ll only do the side quests you think sound like fun, leaving the annoying, tedious or overly difficult ones. You could play start to finish on one difficulty, or you could complete the game on every difficulty. You could get all the unlockables, some or none.
Be realistic. If you don’t want to spend hours trying to complete some mini game to unlock some extra don’t do it. Simple as that.
Ignore what other people say. If you consider a game done when you complete it on normal don’t let anyone tell you that you need to complete it on the hardest difficulty for it to count.
If it’s not fun then don’t play it!
If I’m really not enjoying a game, or it's lost its fun factor, and can’t see myself doing so then I will call it a day and shelve it. It’s done with, no longer an entry on the list of games to complete. There are many ways a game can cease to be enjoyable; in my experience it's rare for them to recover and go back to being good if they haven't picked back up after a couple of hours.
This includes getting stuck at a certain point and becoming completely fed up of trying again. If you’ve failed that boss battle 31 times and have come to loathe the game, the developers, the developer’s cat, and find the mere sight of the boss makes you want to snap the disc and grind the pieces into fine powder which you’ll pour down the throat of the person responsible for designing the battle then it’s better to walk away. It's not worth the misery.
Be realistic about your abilities.
Everyone knows that only n00bs play ‘Generic Action Game 27’ on normal! Real gamers play on suicidal! Except maybe you are rubbish at FPS and will get killed over and over on suicidal mode, meaning you make little progress and end up loathing the game.
Likewise if you’re an action game god then there’s no point in playing ‘Generic Action Game 27’ on normal – unless you want to complete it quickly. That too can be a valid way to play, and can be a boon in getting through several lesser titles in a short space of time. Not entirely recommended, as you'll probably be a bit bored.
I’m rubbish at FPS; I can’t dodge to save my life (har har). I can admit it. This does not harm my ego. I’m playing Bioshock on easy, and I’m probably the only person on the org doing so. The important thing is this: I’m enjoying myself when I play, and I’m making good progress. If I replay it in the future I may try normal and see how (badly) I do. But for now easy gives me enough trouble when I encounter a boss or Big Daddy.
Categorise titles.
This falls into two for me; you may want more or fewer categories.
1. Interest.
It is a simple truth that some games will appeal more than others. Identify those titles which you are most likely to enjoy, and those which will be fun but not great.
2. Time taken to complete.
Aim to know what you are getting into.
From there then you should try to play the factors off against each other. You can finish 4 10 hour games in the time it takes to finish a single 40 hour game. If there are 4 short games of high interest you might be better off playing them instead of a single big game of high interest. Then again, maybe that big game is so much more appealing than anything else that it deserves to become the focus of your play time.
Read games sites and forums in moderation.
I read this forum and a single gaming news site. I will occasionally venture into gamefaqs if I need something in particular. With very, very rare exceptions I do not read previews or interviews, watch trailers, or dabble my toes into the murky pool of hype. Why? Because I found I was spending more time reading about games than actually playing them. I found I was always looking at what would come next rather than playing what was here.
As a side effect I don’t often get let down by games. Quite the contrary, there’s a constant stream of nice surprises as completed games I didn’t know about land and are well received.
Prioritise your buying.
So two games you want are out at the same time? You know you can’t possibly play both right now, and you already have a mountain of ones to play. At this point you should look carefully at both games and see if they are definitely worth getting. For example, do you really need another quite-good-but-not-great game of a genre you already have a lot of? Especially if you still have some better entries in that genre waiting on your to-play pile?
Next you should consider how likely it is that both will be easily available in a few months. Big name games stay on the shelves for a lot longer than smaller titles, so it’s best to buy the smaller title now and pick up the big title later. Often you’ll be able to get the big title for a reduced price as a bonus for your patience.
Big to-play piles come about through bad buying. If you can get your buying under control then you’ll see your pile steadily decrease.
NB: I’m currently failing miserably at this. Gah! Too many cheap good games!
Make a list of your games collection.
I did this a couple of weeks ago for insurance purposes and it was most enlightening. I broke it down by platform to make life easier. Since the information was there, and I was curious, I tagged each game I’d finished or am done with. Games like Civilisation 4 I tagged as unfinishable. Counting these up then allowed me to calculate the percentage overall I’d completed in that category. I’d done far better than I thought in most categories, and that is very encouraging. At the same time I now have a better feel for how many games I have left to play, and that makes it harder to justify buying news ones to myself.
To give an example using my DS collection:
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
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Originally Posted by Ranika
(More seriously, CIV plays natively and MTW can run under Parallels now. If I must, I can boot into Windows, but this gets to be a distraction and lessens the desire for games).
) anyway, so this will probably take me the best part of quite a while to complete.
) so I only really play this when I have ended my Oblivion session and I can take no more of Pro Evo (which is very rare).
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