Gaming vs Life

The 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, the 101st Airborne at Bastogne, Bradford City vs Swansea in the 2013 League Cup Final. All of them one-sided fights, yet none compare to the greatest one-sided battle of all: videogames vs real life.

There once was a time when I would juggle getting up for school and playing videogames like some form of Zen master. I cared not for bedtimes, early classes and getting up at 7AM every day, I could play as much as I wanted into the wee hours of the morning. Similarly, many a gaming night was had in my youth spent playing into the morning light with friends, barely feeling the lack of sleep the next day when we would happily play even more rounds.

That has changed dramatically over time. While university offered me the more-than-tempting free time that should have been spent revising in which to get my fill of gaming, as I march further and further into adult life the amount of time I have to game dwindles. Before succumbing to the dreadful allure of disposable income and a 9-5 job I worked as a freelancer, allowing me to balance writing and gaming depending on the sole factor of “how much do I want to earn today?”

Having re-entered the world of the commute-requiring job, though, I spend very little of my time at home. I’m awake at 6AM and don’t get back home until 7PM. After dinner, writing and other responsibilities I barely have any time to play games anymore.

Oh boo hoo, I can already hear you sarcastically crying. I know, it sounds like yet another twenty-something getting his first proper taste of the real world. It raises an interesting question though: I only have two or a three hours maximum to play videogames a week, and I continually find myself looking towards shorter-form games to satisfy that window of opportunity.

To demonstrate: despite owning a gaming computer, purpose-built by my own hands at great cost, I have more hours in Football Manager and FIFA (1,300 and 470 respectively) than I do BioShock or Skyrim. You may be assigning that trend to an obsession with football – which I do have – yet I also have 200 hours in Prison Architect and around 100 in Game Dev Tycoon. In comparison Shogun Total War, which is one of my all-time favourite games in my all-time favourite series, has just 175 odd hours clocked in.

I immensely enjoyed Far Cry 3 yet can’t bring myself to start it up any more. Shadow of Mordor barely gets a look in now. My newest obsession is Darkest Dungeon. Why this sudden shift you might wonder?

It’s down to playability. I have just a few hours a week to play games, and if most of those hours are spent in cutscenes, or driving / walking from point to point they might as well be counted as wasted. By contrast, as soon as I boot up FIFA I can be playing a match against someone online. Prison Architect drops you right back where you left off and Darkest Dungeon offers the tactics I crave in the short bites I need.

In a world in which people are constantly on the move and don’t have the time for massive gaming sessions as much as they used to, the indie game is king. Perhaps not just the indie game, though – the short-session, quick-game toting AAAs have their moments too.
This is a driving reason behind my thorough enjoyment of Evolve. If I want a game of Evolve I load it up, click a few menu options, select a class and then off I go, hunting a monster with three other players. No long-winded intros, no fast-travel, no having to remember exactly what quest I was doing when I put the controller down a few weeks ago.

I’ve never been a handheld console kind of guy. I owned a DS when it first came out but sold it barely two years later to fund my PC obsession. Now, with a three-hour commute daily (pending driving lessons) on public transport I have a great vector for treading those waters again. I’ve moaned before about mobile games, yet this could be the root of their popularity – games that can be played on the train to work (which is essentially dead time in the day).

Perhaps, should I find a job closer to home or be one of the exalted lucky few to find a paid job in games journalism, this will change. For the moment though, quirky indie games and jump-in playability will be the centre of my gaming world. What else am I going to do with my precious time? Something constructive?