I have this problem pretty often: I’m excited about a video game, I play the video game. Then, I think about another video game and get excited about that one. The conundrum is that I can only play one video game at any given time, and I often have unfinished business in the first game when I want to be playing the second one. The challenge becomes: how do I go back and forth between multiple games, having fun with both, and not lose interest in one of them. Adding in a third game complicates this even further.
It’s a surprisingly difficult balance, and I’ve been trying to master it for at least a decade. In some rare cases, you can play two games at the exact same time. But most of the time it feels like they are competing for your attention, and you do have to pick one at a time. Returning to a game you haven’t played even in a couple days sometimes totally halts your momentum, and by the time you get your bearings, the same will be true of the first game. If you’re thinking ahead a bit, you can leave notes for yourself, but it’s not the same.
Here’s an example from the last few weeks. Stardew Valley announced a small upcoming content update (way in the future), and I got inspired to start a farm. I’ve never completed the perfection achievement in that game, so that was my goal, and I was singularly focused for a while. Then, Slay The Spire 2 launched in early access, and I was seeing too much about it to resist buying it (it’s amazing, by the way). This made my progress on Stardew stall heavily, but I figured the novelty would wear off and I would default back to my farm within a couple of weeks.
Unfortunately, something else happened instead. Inexplicably, a portion of my brain decided to get excited about returning to DragonFable for the first time in seven years. So I’ve been playing that exclusively for the last week, and I sort of feel stuck. I’m stuck having fun, so it’s a good problem to have, but I do really want to get perfection in Stardew Valley. And I want to play more Slay the Spire! I haven’t even tried the co-op yet! To make matters even worse, I’ve been considering replaying Skyward Sword again. It’s bad enough that they keep making great games that I want to play, but half the time it’s the older games that drag me away from the new ones.
In high school, I spent a lot of time playing online competitive games, which I have plenty of negative things to say about, maybe in another post. But I will say that these types of games lend themselves really well to gamecycling, for two reasons. First, losing feels really bad, so losing multiple times in a row creates a natural time to stop playing. In other words: when you stop having fun, you stop playing. Second, these games are best enjoyed with friends, so you can limit yourself based on when your fellow players are available to play with you, and in the meantime you can play your other game. In both cases, gamecycling is easier because the stopping point is externally imposed on you. Singleplayer games that are fun the whole time are harder to gamecycle with because you have to decide yourself when to stop and switch.
Unfortunately for me, those are almost exclusively the types of games I play now. Over time, I’ve learned to lean towards an approach that prioritizes following my heart for what to play, even though it means I sometimes put down and pick up games at a moment’s notice, meaning I often accomplish less in a given game than I intend to when I first start playing it. Part of me wishes I was more of a dedicated completionist, because it can be extremely satisfying to fully finish everything a game has to offer, and it’s a flex to have accomplished the especially difficult challenges in a game. But there’s also something very cool about having had a huge breadth of experiences with games, and I suppose this is the angle I lean toward more naturally.
When I get lucky, I end up playing two games that seem to compliment each other, like a good pairing of food and wine. More often, though, I’m just trying to surf the waves of my own excitement long enough to have a good experience with the games I play. Right now, that means juggling three games that don’t really make sense together, and maybe neglecting that new farm a little. But in the meantime, I’m having fun.
Phil Rienstra (they/he) (’21) studied writing and music, and since graduating has developed an interest in labor rights and coffee. They’re an amateur chef, a perennial bandana wearer, a fledgling dungeon master, and an Enneagram 4. He lives in St. Paul with his spouse, Heidi.
