brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
Brin ([personal profile] brin_bellway) wrote 2019-06-29 03:47 pm (UTC)

I don't entirely understand it myself, but from what I can tell I can't be in phase with a game that I expect I would complete in the foreseeable future. I even have trouble with Flight Rising sometimes: it started as soon as I realised I'd gotten good enough at the game that completing my familiar collection was a totally feasible goal on the order of a couple of years of active play (what will I do *after* that?), and has been getting gradually worse as I get closer to that goal.

I need *progression*, need to feel like I'm setting up a better world for my future selves, planting trees that they will harvest. I do that in other areas of my life too, of course, but it seems to also be psychologically important that I have that in games specifically. Short games can be fun, but they aren't *satisfying*: they don't fill the game-shaped hole in my psyche.

(The mental widget seems to function similarly to special interests, but in miniature. They *can* overlap: if I have a special interest in a game, phases for that game are longer and phases for other games are shorter. I have never had a special interest in a game I couldn't also be in phase with, though admittedly the sample size is not that large.)

I played a little bit of the Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban GBA game a couple days ago, a game that I remember specifically liking *because* each game influences the next, and that I had stopped playing after reaching the end of the meta-game. I could definitely see the appeal, but it felt shallower than I'd like, and I think the knowledge that I *have* fully completed this game (albeit in the distant past, on a machine whose savefiles I probably can't feasibly preserve if I can even find the device and get it to function at all) is hampering it too.

(A couple months back I checked to see if I could still get into my old Neopets account--I stopped playing several years ago because I'd grown tired of the increasingly intrusive advertising, but then again when I left Runescape in 2016 I didn't really expect to come back, so who knows--and I found that they had deleted my account from inactivity and given the username to someone else. I don't even really know how I feel about that: maybe it's too big for me to wrap my head around. That's the problem with games large and actively developed enough to satisfy me, I suppose: they tend to be dependant on external servers.)

I know I used to be at least somewhat more flexible about this, but I don't know how much of that is a childhood approach to play, or what. Some of it could even just be being *worse* at games so that "won't finish this in the foreseeable future" is a lower bar to clear. (I was going to say "I played so much Croc 2 and *never* made it past the first village", but I just looked it up and apparently that game actually has a reputation for being difficult, so possibly not a good example. (And come to think of it, I'm not sure I was even *aware* as a child that Croc 2 had areas beyond the first: I may have *believed* that I'd finished.) I wonder if I could make it past the first village now.)

(Or it could be partly to do with time relative to lifespan: "this game will take you about three years to complete" gets a response from an 8-year-old of "that's basically forever, I'll take it", and a response from a 25-year-old of "I mean, that's a *fairly* long time, but I'm not sure it's long *enough*". Or just lack of access and autonomy, making do with whatever games I could get ahold of the same way I had to make do with music and porn†.

(I remember thinking, when I was perhaps 11 or 12, that dressing up Barbie dolls had been a mere proxy, making do because I hadn't the concept of anything better: what I'd actually wanted was a Neopet.))

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Oddly enough, I am *not* the kind of person who never re-reads books, nor do I watch soap operas. There are many forms of media where I am perfectly okay with them being finite four-dimensional objects that one simply revisits if one wishes to experience more of them: games are just not one of them, for whatever reason.

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†I feel like you're probably going to respond to that with "you had *any* access to porn as a child??", to which I answer "Well, I mean, define 'porn'".

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