Marking Time: Changing Perceptions of Resources For An Aging Gamer

It’s all about time. It always has been, always will be. When we are kids time never goes fast enough and as we get older time goes too fast. Every day Pea reminds me that a trip to the store, waiting for me to take the trash out, or waiting for dinner to be be finished so that we can run off and play are all just taking too long. 5 minutes is too long and she’d do damn near anything to get time to go just a bit faster.

The same thing holds true when when it comes to gamers. As a younger gamer I never had enough time. Not enough time to do my homework and play games. I remember the periods when I had ample gaming time well. Sitting on the couch in the living room knocking back Mountain Dew, eating chips, and playing games between semesters or during that rare time when I was ahead of schedule. And then there was graduate school. I replaced Mountain Dew with beer and cigarettes and my games of choice were Final Fantasy VII and Resident Evil. I spent a lot of time playing games and a lot of time was spent playing the same games. Games that I loved, like FF VII and games that I hated like the stupid Star Wars robot walker game for the N64 whose title I have blocked mentally. Back then I had little choice. Games didn’t come out as frequently and I didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of expendable income to buy new games. Once you bought one you were kind of committed to it until a birthday, Christmas, or some kind of windfall left you with enough cash to buy a new one and start all over again. That was right around the time that I learned that GoldenEye for the N64 was the first game that ever made me motion sick (even those most folks still claim that it was the best Bond game ever made). Time. Never enough. 

Fast forward 20 years. I’m still gaming and time is still an issue. Now I find that I have more time. Time that is not dedicated to academic work, but time that has to be dedicated to something else. Family. Friends (very few of them game anymore). Work (this one doesn’t really count because my work revolves around games these days). And not necessarily in that order. But being a more mature gamer has brought about another change in time for me. Now I have finally come to the realization that I don’t have time to play bad games. Games with crappy narratives. Shoddy mechanics. Offensive characterizations (unless that’s specifically what I’m looking for). Or games that I just plain old don’t like. Being a professional now also gives me some extra spare cash to buy a few more games here and there and little more freedom to toss a game on the shelf and try to pretend I never wasted that 60 or 70 bucks in the first place.

Over the years I have learned to not feel guilty about not finishing a game or even for giving up on it after a few hours (think the last few iterations of Final Fantasy, Lollipop Chainsaw, Deus Ex, and numerous others). In the long run this guilt-free desertion of games has led to my finishing more, rather than fewer, games. As I play my way into my gaming golden years, this means that I get to play more games that I actually enjoy playing and that I play and finish faster. There is no more sludging through unsolvable puzzles, mechanics that make the game unplayable, or ridiculously laggy multiplayer matches. Ultimately, being the “old” gamer has actually made me a better and happier gamer. This is something that the younger Mountain Dew drinking, beer swigging, and cigarette smoking me would never understand. Who’d have thunk that in all of the years that I had been plying for MORE time to play MORE games that what I would have ultimately been looking for was permission to spend LESS time playing games that I really didn’t want to play anyway.