How to deal with managing your adult responsibilities, playing multiplayer with your squad, and chiseling away at your RPG-riddled backlog.
When we were kids, we had all the time in the world to play our favorite video games but no real income to acquire the latest and greatest releases. This often led to us replaying our favorite titles over and over and mastering our favorite games. Now, we’re adults with steady jobs and low-impulse control, causing us to buy a dozen new games every Steam sale, or PSN sale, despite already having four AAA titles in the plastic wrapper still that you just haven’t had a chance to get to. For some of us, it’s a challenge just to find a few hours a week to sneak on and play. For others, we can find time pretty easily but we always just end up playing Call of Duty: Warzone with a few buddies, or just playing a few hours of Rocket League mindlessly until we have to go to bed to prepare ourselves for another day of being a functional adult. Hopefully, this article will help motivate you to power up and play!
“I wish I could play more, but I just don’t have the time”
As adult gamers, this is a phrase that all of us have said. While there is truth to the statement, it’s not entirely accurate. The fact is that most of us DO have time, we just aren’t very wise with how we’re spending that time. If you want to chisel out another couple of hours a week to game, you need to look at how you spend your time at home. Do you spend time mindlessly scrolling through Facebook? Did you re-watch three episode of The Office for the 27th time? Or even better, did you visit the subreddit of your favorite game and read about it for 45 minutes, when you could’ve actually been playing it? The first step to making time for gaming is acknowledging that you do actually have the time! Try cutting back on some of your other mindless time-wasters, and instead, plug that time in with a good old-fashioned gaming session!
“What’s the point of starting a game if I only have 30 minutes?”
This the classic catch 22 of being an adult gamer. You have some spare time, but it’s only 30 minutes. With games today, just turning on the console, logging in and loading a game can take up to 10 minutes, so what’s the point? Well, even if it did take you almost 10 minutes to log-in, you still have 20 minutes left! Rest/stand-by modes were made for this exact scenario. You can finish a quest and even start the next one, and when your time is up you can simply turn off your console, come back later and pick up exactly where you left off, like you never even left! Just starting when you don’t think you have time will motivate you to come back and play more, and you’ll begin to slowly chip away at that ever-growing backlog.
If you’re not the single-player type of gamer, there are plenty of games out there that will allow you to play a quick match or two. I find it important to always have a couple of games in my current rotation that can be played in short bursts. Games like the aforementioned Rocket League where matches have a 5 minute timer and relatively no loading time are great for these quick, spur-of-the-moment gaming sessions. Overwatch, Super Smash Brothers, FIFA (or any sports game for that matter) are other options with quick, instant-action, multiplayer gameplay.
“I want to dig into my backlog, but I always just end up playing online with friends”
And there is nothing wrong with that! This is the type of gamer that I most relate to. I always have called myself a “social gamer”. I love video games, but I think I would play them 90% less if I didn’t have the friends and community I’ve built over the years playing them with me. With that being said, sometimes it is depressing to look back and see that you just spent your entire weekend playing Warzone with buddies, while you just paid full price for The Last of Us 2 and haven’t even started it yet. This is something I’ve personally experienced and struggled with. The best answer for this that my friends and I have discovered, is setting aside one night a week to totally binge and indulge yourselves on whatever multiplayer game it is that brings your crew together. For my friends and I, that game is DotA2. We’ve dubbed Thursdays as “DotA Thursdays” — our wives know, our girlfriends know, even our friends that know us but don’t play DotA know, that they have to leave us alone on Thursday so we can all get it out of our system at once. This is great because we get to play with the entire squad every Thursday, we don’t have to wonder if anybody is going to be signing on, if it’s Thursday, we’re playing DotA! This helps free up the rest of the week for other games and other responsibilities.
I hope these tips help you find more time to game. At the end of the day, you just need to power up and play! Comment below and let me know what games you’ve been meaning to play forever, and how you plan on finally getting around to them!
