A couple months ago I attempted to start a new rule for my
gaming time; to allow time to play something new every day regardless of
platform for at least 15 minutes. The
reason behind this was a personal drive to try new games coming out, try genres
that I wouldn’t usually touch and break the mono-game mentality.
For those that aren’t aware of the term, mono-gamer/ing
relates to the focus of your gaming time on a single game. Usual examples of this include competitive games
(like Dota, LoL, Starcraft 2, CounterStrike, Call of Duty) and social games
like MMO’s (World of Warcraft, Eve online, Guild Wars 2) or Facebook games (Farmville). My experience of mono-gaming has featured
most of these titles (in short wow->hon->dota2->gw2) and my time was really
enjoyable. The thing is everyone has a
point (which they may have not experienced yet) where they start to consider
the amount of time one has invested into a game and what other things you could
be doing. People have different
reactions to it, some will go to the polar opposite type of game / hobby
whereas others will find something similar, but the sentiment is usually the
same.
So, a couple months ago I stopped playing Guild Wars 2
(MMORPG) and found myself not really knowing what to do with my free time. What I ended up doing was going back to
Warframe (F2P shooter) and this started to fulfil the allotted time. The thing is, playing one single game over
all others has become less of an enticing action to take as more varied games
have come out and I’ve got the financial backing to try out games. The steam summer sale was kind of a catalyst
for this, but since then I’ve been playing lots of different games. These games include Don’t Starve (survival), Path
of Exile (dungeon crawler), Electronic Superjoy (platformer), Hawken (mech
shooter), Rogue Legacy (rogue-like), Sanctum TD (tower defence), Transistor
(action-RPG), The Stanley Parable (non-specific), and many more. As well as this, I’ve been trying more mobile
games and seeing what the platform can create unique to the tech.
While I’ve been doing this, there has been only short bursts
of time where I’ve stuck to my ‘try something new every day’, but I feel that I’ve
fit into a nice happy medium of new-to-old game time investment. For example, today I tried Max Gentlemen for
20 minutes but played Warframe for 5 hours.
Trying new experiences is all good in getting you thinking about new
experiences and the sorts, but it’s reasonable to have a core-set of titles
that you can enjoy irrelevant to context.
That being said, this is a mentality I’ve tried to take on in other
interests I have both on and offline.
In Architecture, I was aligned to a specific mind-set for a
long period of time which dictated my thoughts on the medium. Heidegger theory, Brutalism design era and
the architect Tadao Ando were my go-to topics for 2-3 years during university;
but moving from architecture to history allowing me to express my thoughts in
lots of different ways (see intro to this blog) and improve my own knowledge
and interest. My career path possibilities
have expanded due to being more open to different areas of the heritage sector
beyond archiving / curating even to the point of considering the possibility of
freelance / self-employed status.
Anyway, I was just thinking this over after finishing my
Warframe session tonight and wanted to write it down. It can sometimes be good to write about your
thoughts to allow you to make more sense of what you think / how you want to
implement something. Take the time to
think about your own gaming habits and how it fits into other facets of your
life. You may find it interesting = )
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