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Guilt in recreation activity… that’s a paradoxical concept, isn’t it? Stressing over something that’s supposed to help you relax? And yet it happens all the time to people, even without outside factors involved.
Case in point, regular readers of this blog should have picked up by now that I am a fan of computer gaming and also tabletop gaming like role-playing games. So are, by some utterly bizarre coincidence, a fair number of my long-term friends. But the dialogues we have now often touch on some themes and topics that weren’t prevalent in our younger years.
There are those who would accuse us of not having proper hobbies for “grown-ups” as if we were stuck in some state of arrested development, but if only it were so. Instead there are homesteads to manage, children to tend, work to be done and bills to pay. We have progressed from poor yet enthusiastic youth to an adulthood which has more money but a comparative lack of time and energy, especially in terms of coordinating any group activities. And so we occasionally note and bemoan the cycle of being intrigued by some new TTRPG, purchasing it, and having it thereafter gather dust on a shelf, sometimes without even a real go at reading through it. Running a session? Possibly, if you can get the spoons together and channel everyone’s excitement into a commitment. Running a campaign? Woof, good luck, even on an irregular basis. That goes even for online attempts, where more than once a game has been derailed by sudden family needs or other such emergency adultings. So there we are, occasionally bemoaning the proverbial shelf — whether digital or physical — which continues to accumulate RPG books for systems that may never even be more than skimmed, much less played.
So, what about a nice single-player computer game, right? Well if you’ve got kids chances are you’ll be needing to pause a lot, or even quit out on a moment’s notice, so stuff with any sort of checkpoint system is still going to be tricky. And without kids, it remains tricky because the days of staying up all night are behind you, or on those very rare occasions when it still happens your body will cheerfully remind you why it should no longer be attempted. Further complicating matters in my case is that I prefer games with some level of immersive and rich story content, with choices to be made that matter. I also like exploring and doing interesting “side quests” — but therein lies the rub, doesn’t it? All too often, my drive to play runs out of gas somewhere along the route, and it’s often because I picked up something new on sale and now that’s become the favored toy. Deprived of momentum, I stop actively caring about the fate of the Worldwound or whatever other endgame is driving the engine of engagement, and for all intents and purposes the game has gone “on the shelf,” doing nothing now but occupying space in my Steam library. And looking at that list becomes a guilty feeling, like I’ve left food on my plate at dinnertime (a no-no in my house growing up which I find hard to overcome to this day).
Ever booted up a game you haven’t played for awhile and found you’ve just about completely forgotten where your character is, what they’re doing and (perhaps most importantly) how they go about doing it? Dawn sometimes just starts games over when that happens so she can learn again from the ground up, but the idea of doing that with something like Divinity: Original Sin 2 was mildly horrifying to me given how long I remember it took just getting to Act 2 (and then Act 2 was even longer!). At one point last year (or was it the year before?) I rolled up my sleeves and determined to finish, and had pushed through almost to the finale before the momentum ran out again. Same thing happened with Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and Cyberpunk 2077 to the point it felt like this was becoming a bad habit, a videogame equivalent of tantric edging without any of the supposed dividends to body and soul.
So over 4th of July weekend I went back and finished all three of those while doing my best to feel like it was not some chore or obligation. I cut the remaining side-quests loose. I even performed the sacrilege of setting the difficulty lower. This hurt me less than I thought I would because honestly when you go back to some of these games you realize just how much inventory management there is and (particularly in DOS 2’s case) how gimmicky the combat can be. All those clunky mechanics you suffered through before come oozing back into your reality and the honeymoon that carried you through them back in the day is long since over. Wrath of the Righteous is so buff-centric it also feels borderline unplayable without the 3rd-party mod that automates that process.
But all three games still have great writing and a great story, it’s just that it came down to a decision of not spending time reloading and retreading. And I did it! I got through them, watched an ending and then uninstalled two of the three.
Yes, there are multiple endings and all those side-quests and paths not traveled, but I just felt I needed to cut bait somewhere or I’d be nothing more than a digital hoarder. If I really need to see what I’ve missed I can call up a YouTube clip, I’m sure.
Right now I’ve got less than a month until Larian Studios officially launches Baldur’s Gate 3, which they promise is much bigger than DOS 2. Gulp.
The cycle continues…