I went into this a bit on one of the podcasts, but here, in full, is my deal.

Gaming, by its nature, is a great hobby for kids. My first game was Phantasy Star on the Sega Master System, and I fell in love with it because I had the time to. Summers full of free afternoons led to the besting of infuriating, side-scrolling behemoths like Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania. Given enough free time and patience, a kid can sit in front of any game and grind or practice until it’s done. These are decent lessons in patience and pattern recognition, and I’ve never for a second regretted wiling away so many hours in front of the TV. 

Time well spent?

But the first thing that I realized when I started revisiting the old platformers and action games of my youth was just how monotonous it is having to repeat large portions of the game after dying. I’m not known for my patience. I want something that I can beat incrementally, without having to worry about one misjudged jump erasing the last few minutes of my life. This may explain my shift in focus to RPGs, but also brings up the investment of time on a larger scale. If I’m uncomfortable losing time when I eat it from a Lakitu, why should I be happy to throw away 20 to 80 hours on some spiky-haired crystal bullshit? Then I wonder why I play games at all and spend the rest of the afternoon depressed and watching reruns of Coach.

Apartment circa 2004For a long time, I was earnestly trying to pin down what exactly it is that I love about the games I love. Why is it worth it to me to put 100 hours into DQVIII? For fuck’s sake, I am an adult and this is a hundred hours of my life. I could be using this time in more productive ways. I could be doing laundry or looking for a new job or learning a language. I could have learned how to play the guitar in the time it took me to beat Gitaroo Man on Master Play.

I may have begun to develop my patience by playing games, but I feel like I’ve got a pretty good handle on it by now. I can survive a long work shift or international flight, but task me with any kind of GCCX-style challenge and I would go mad. Learning the difference between free time and work time has changed the way I approach my hobbies, in particular regard to gaming. As an adult, it’s taken me a long time to figure out just how much time I can invest in a hobby on a day to day basis before feeling like a bum.

But maybe that’s it. As a kid, games were toys. They still are! But it’s gotten to the point where the investment of resources is becoming greater than the joy yielded from games. I’ve established that I don’t feel comfortable putting time into something I’m not absolutely going to enjoy. If I am going to put that kind of time and money into something these days, it’s going to be for one purpose: good, old fashioned escapism.

This took ten hours of my life.I don’t want this to turn into some sort of “games as art” argument, but it is a point directly tied to the escapist quality of many games. A game does not necessarily have to be “arty” for me to escape into it; it just needs to be about something more than achievement. In college, I attempted to introduce games to my then-girlfriend. As we sat on the floor of her room playing FFX, her father would often stick his mustachioed head through the door frame and ask, “Do you have the high score yet?!” and I would cringe because I knew his sass was at least partially warranted. I don’t typically play or enjoy racing games, FPSs, or fighters. But to him, there’s no difference between these adrenal genres and something slow and beautiful like Shadow of the Colossus. It’s the same difference between Die Hard 4 and The Godfather. I’m not about to get emotionally invested in Bruce Willis.

It shouldn’t be so tough to discern escapism from distraction. I still don’t quite have it down. Is it wrong to put time into the latter? Should I be putting in a load of darks instead of playing a third game of Crystal Defenders? Yeah, probably. So why do I find it okay to camp Metal King Slimes for hours on end? I think that there’s something about investing that kind of time into grinding in a series I’m fond of that is intrinsically more rewarding than just killing time. I can’t even play DQ on the train (or even read a book!) anymore for fear that I’ll enjoy it and then have to snap myself back into reality before my stop. That’s where distractive games come in. Lately I’ve been trying to get into more thoughtless (though not necessarily mindless) gaming on the iPhone to kill time in transit or until I can get home and sit down with an escapist game.

You are running out of time.

The degree and purpose of escapism are also factors. There are times when I don’t need it. I visited my parents in New Jersey last week, and found myself playing almost no games at all. I had intended to dig out some of my old favorites from the basement, but to escape from what? The vacation itself was my escape. To sit around the living room playing Silent Hill 2 would go against the entire reason I flew back to America in the first place. Plus, explaining mannequin rape to my mom is not on the to-do list. I quietly packed about two dozen games into my duffel and played with the dog. On the flip side, I spent all of this morning in the open arms of escapist gaming, calming my agitated nerves with DQIX and trying to forget that Northwest lost my bags (and I’m still waiting for them).

Comments on this topic are welcome. Why do you play games? How have your tastes changed over the years? How much time do you invest in different types of games? Exactly how much grinding can you do in a single session before feeling like a degenerate outcast gameophile?