Thoughts: Do I actually WANT to play that game?
How SHOULD is stalling me getting through my backlog.
In articles prefixed with “Thoughts” I share some ideas or commentary on stuff I have seen in the gaming industry / community rather than a review of a game.
You may or may not have noticed that there haven’t been that many reviews on here as of late. Or maybe I am just imagining that I am not writing them.
I have however struggled to play and complete games, to then be able to write my reviews. While the odd game here and there clicked, these were not necessarily the games I felt I SHOULD have been playing to complete my backlog or write the next piece.
The illusive backlog completion is a goal I will likely never reach. There are just too many games on it and I have too little time, to play them all to their fullest and complete every main story.
What then really doesn’t help is the word SHOULD. My brain is playing tricks on me complaining that while I play the new Pokémon game, I really SHOULD be playing Zelda BotW because that is in progress.
Similarly today, I wanted to start Elden Ring again, but my little voice is going, “Nope, you SHOULD play Animal Well, Zelda BoTW, Palworld or any of the other games in your backlog that you have never even played yet”.
Do you ever get stuck in such a loop and can’t get out of it?
I do know of this pattern. My brain often does this to sabotage myself. I have coping mechanisms to deal with it though.
For example I try to reframe SHOULD to WANT. This tends to work for me for trying to eat more home-made food … “I WANT to make more meals from scratch”, or exercising… “I WANT to move my body more”. This also has the nice effect that it makes me feel less like a failure when I don’t do it, as the word SHOULD seems to contain some sort of negativity for me. Looking up the meaning it is actually defined as most often being used when criticising someone. Whereas WANT for me contains a choice and I am in control.
So currently the voice shouting SHOULD is pretty loud for me. I do however want to change that and also relax a bit. I need to remind myself that this is a marathon and not a sprint and gaming and writing about my experience is a hobby I enjoy. And also more importantly it is about enjoying games and not rushing through them.
And if I feel like playing a game I have played before or actually want to play in the moment I will let myself. Who knows I might even play Skyrim again thanks to this awesome post by Joe of The Saved Game.
But yeah I will start to ask myself more like what I actually WANT to play in the moment and maybe it will be a bit more random and adhoc and less complete, but currently I feel a bit stuck.
I think there is an element of also being caught in the hype loop. This has led to some game purchases and play-throughs that may not have happened otherwise but so far I have not regretted any. But I feel like my little voice in my head has an expectations that things should be new now, but there are so many games out there I haven’t played that look right up my street. So I will play those I WANT to play, … when I can choose. haha!
Have you tried these random game selectors before? They select which game to play next from your backlog. I don’t know if that will fulfil either of my voices in my head. As I want to be in control but using a randomiser I then again am not in control.
Anyways let’s play what we WANT to play and not what we feel like we SHOULD be playing and ignore or embrace the hype. Whichever works best for you.
I’ve had this same issue with Scarlet and Violet. That game has been out for 3 years now, and I bought it on release. Yet, I still haven’t touched it. I heard about the bugs when it first launched, so I was waiting til a lot of it got patched. I just can’t seem to get around to playing it now even though I feel like I SHOULD since I dropped the 60 on it on launch.
As someone who’s whole deal is playing and reviewing retro games, I have that dilemma all the time. For me, it’s a self inflicted problem because I start out wanting to review specific games in a specific order. But there are many instances where the game I’m trying to gear up to review just isn’t really what I feel like playing thanks to the endless back I have across multiple platforms. My Steam library suffers the worst.
My biggest take away from your article is that asking myself if I WANT to play X game is a way of telling the voice in my head that tries to obligate me to play what doesn’t interest me, “I am the captain now”.