💭 I Think I Miss Having Fewer Games
I've been thinking a lot about how much digital ownership has changed the way I interact with games. And I think a lot of my problem isn't actually that I like too many games. It's that all of the games are there, all the time. It's so easy to jump from one thing to another. You go on the eShop, see something interesting, and within a few minutes it's sitting there, ready to play. And I think that changes something. Well, it definitely created a problem for me to the point that I had to do a no-buy challenge.
So I was watching someone on YouTube talk about how they manage their backlog, and they had this idea I really liked. They made a physical basket...not for physical games necessarily, just little representations of the games they wanted to play. They'd taken some physical objects and taped the names of the games on them so that it would be a physical representation of the digital game. And that basket sat next to their console. That was their current rotation. One RPG, maybe. One shorter game. Something that was just a palette cleanser. I really liked that idea, because it harkens back to the olden days... you know, as a 90s kid. I honestly don't remember having hundreds and hundreds of games on my shelf. For any console I owned as a kid, it was always like, maybe ten games (I may be extremely off base here, but I swear I don't remember having shelves full of games...)? And because you had that limitation, you actually knew what you had. You'd look at the shelf and think, okay, these are my games... and then you'd pick one.
I've been thinking about this a lot because I see it with my son now. He has my old original Switch. He doesn't have hundreds of games; he has a handful. Sometimes we borrow games from the library. And when he gets one, he just plays that. Over and over. The same level, the same game, the same thing, and he is completely satisfied. There's no "maybe there's something better I should be playing." There's no scrolling through a huge library trying to decide. He just plays. He's just in that moment with that game. I'm seeing it right now with Mario 3D World. He'll replay the same levels... not because he has to, just because he likes them... That's it. That's the whole motivation.
Somewhere along the way, having more choices changed the way I engage with games. I can have a hundred games available to me and somehow still feel like I have nothing to play. Which is kind of ridiculous, honestly. The problem isn't that I don't have games. The problem is I have too many choices. And that's why I like the idea of building some kind of physical limitation back in. Some kind of constraint. Not to pretend I don't have other games. But because sometimes having fewer choices actually makes it easier to choose.
It's funny, because technology has made gaming so much more convenient. I love that I can have my entire library with me. I love that I can put my Switch to sleep and pick it right back up where I left off... that's one of the reasons I love it so much. But at the same time, having everything available all the time changes the relationship you have with the games themselves. When you only had a few, you had to spend time with them. Figure them out. Keep playing. Now, if something doesn't grab me immediately, a hundred other games are waiting.
I thought The Long Play would be the thing that reined it all in. I'd play one game, write about it, and then be done with it and move on. But I'm realizing maybe that's not the point. Maybe the point isn't forcing myself to become someone who only plays one game at a time, or someone who never gets distracted. Maybe it's about creating enough friction that I actually give games the attention they deserve. Because I do think a lot of these games are worth spending time with.