I have been really deep in a gaming slump pretty much since I let my World of Warcraft sub lapse a little over a month ago. Other than a three day binge of New Pokemon Snap on the switch, I haven’t really been excited about anything gaming-wise. Part of it is that there’s a lot of other things going on right now, but another part of it is just that I have absolutely no patience with anything that has even the slightest learning curve.
Which got me thinking about how often I’ll fire up a game, and close out of it again in less than 10 minutes, which prompted me to toss up a poll on Twitter.
The results pretty much confirmed to me that I’m am ridiculously impatient!
I fully admit to having a lot of filler in my game library – I love bundles and tend to add a lot of things that I’m not sure about but might scratch an itch someday. I’m not terribly upset if those games never get played. However, I also have a lot of things I was really excited about when I added them to my library, and those are the games I’m going to target now.
I’ve gone through my Steam library and picked out fifteen games that I know I was excited to play. During the month of June, I plan to spend at least 45 minutes with each game. Not only will this get me playing more often, and giving these titles more than five minutes to capture my attention, I’m hoping to have enough to say about them to make at least a Quick Look post on each game.
There’s just a few days left to May, and I have a few more things to wrap up before I dive into this project, but hopefully, this space will be a whole lot more active than it has been this month!
Nerd Girl Thoughts 
Sounds a fun project and way to get back into the swing of things.
Game time to determine enjoyment I find swings dramatically from game to game for me. But if I had to put an average on it, probably 40m-1hr for me too. However, there are some that after 5-15m I’m fairly confident are a ‘nope’ from me, even if only when considered relative to whatever else I might be playing at the time.
Looking forward to seeing how you go with this in any case! 😀
LikeLiked by 1 person
I probably don’t need 45 minutes when I’m stretching outside of my preferred genres, but the kind of games I like best tend to have a bit of a learning curve, which I’m frequently impatient with. Hopefully, this will get me over that hump on games that I *should* enjoy.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I hear that. For the most part, I really enjoy a game with depth even when it has a bit of a learning curve to get into.
But I really do need to be in a particular mood to climb that hill otherwise it just isn’t happening. I don’t know how many times I picked up Crusader Kings II and put it down again promptly after before finally getting into it properly.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I nearly bought Cloudpunk yesterday so I’m interested to see what you think of that one. In general I can tell in moments if I’m going to enjoy a game or not but that does feed off having played similar things before. I’d probably still give something fifteen minutes to half an hour before binning it even if it seemed like it wasn’t working.
When it comes to things that feel entirely unfamiliar, it depends. If I really hated it I’d quit right away but if it was just new and confusing with a steep learning curve I’d probably keep going until I felt I understood enough to tell whether it was the mechanics i disliked or the game itself.
And, of course, mood factors into it hugely. Some days I just can’t be bothered to learn new things, other days it’s all I want to do.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I set the goal at 15-30min to motivate myself to get started trying unknowns (it feels less intimidating) and usually end up going 45min or longer.
What’s funny is that the one go at it often ends up being all I wanted from 80% of the games, and I wind up putting them down for something else. Makes it kinda impossible to blog about them because I’ve forgotten what I tried or did in one game two days later.
There are, fortunately, about 20% of the games that do strike a ‘revisit this later’ chord, so that seems good enough. I do seem to be falling off huge time investment or complicated strategy games rather quickly these days. It’s like life with this new pandemic ‘normal’ just doesn’t feel stable enough to invest effort into anything super long term.
LikeLiked by 1 person