Video games really do just keep coming out. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could just stop for a bit, so we can all catch up?
Thinking about how I can “maximize my time” enjoying media is something I do a lot. And it definitely doesn’t help when companies are putting out new games. Nintendo is putting out a Breath of the Wild 2??? I heard Microsoft was making a new Halo game. And Traveler’s Tales has the nerve to make Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga? Who do they think they are…
Transcript:
Lemme ask you again. Are there too many games? Is that a stupid thing to ask? Did you scoff when you saw the video title? Did you think that I’m a massive moron idiot for even considering the possibility that we have “too many” games? Well that’s fair. But I think there’s some people out there that know that feeling. The feeling that games just keep coming out and you can’t play games quick enough to keep up with all the new releases. I’m just gonna skip to the end of the video and answer the question posited in the title. It’ll save you, and more importantly, me, time. I won’t have to make some 15 minute, 22 second long video about such a stupid topic. I can just get it over in less than a minute or two. Okay… Yeah, yeah I get it. Man I really just ramble. It’s no wonder YouTube doesn’t recommend my vi- Oh here we go! So are games too plentiful? Of course not. Claiming that there’s too many video games is nonsense. There. You don’t even need to watch my video now. You can just go back to watching Vtuber clips on end for hours and I can go back to putting off playing some game. For the single person out there who’s actually interested in what I have to say, for some reason, I’ll go back to the beginning and let it play out. Uhh… WARNING. From this point out there will only be intellectual discussion on choice paralysis, maybe talk a little about gaming backlogs, definitely talk about how it’ll get worse over the years, look into why you should care, and why anime is going to be the death of us all. So if you aren’t ready for all that, get outta here... Lemme just rewind real quick… The grown-ups are talking now, go back to YouTube Kids. Aaand... Play. I absolutely adore the Lego games. They’re cute little playsets that take place in a ton of amazing franchises. If you’re a fan of any franchise that there’s a Lego game for, I think you owe it to yourself to give it a go. The fan service and deep cuts in these games are insane. As much as I do love the games, I can’t really do a lot to justify that love on an objective level. If you play one of them, it’s pretty enjoyable, especially if you’re a fan of that franchise. But once you beat 2 or 3 of them, the gameplay becomes mind-numbingly dull. In my lifetime, I’ve beaten Lego Star Wars, Lego Star Wars 2, Lego Star Wars the Complete Saga, Lego Batman 2, Lego Lord of the Rings, Lego Marvel Super Heroes, The Lego Movie Videogame, Lego The Hobbit, Lego Avengers, Lego Star Wars The Force Awakens, and Lego Marvel Super Heroes. In my previous videos, I’d show each game cover as I go through lists like that, but there’s too many and I can’t muster up the effort to actually do that, considering how many there are. Fuck it. And you know what? I’m a real degenerate. I’m even excited for Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. 7/9ths of that game is going to cover movies that were already covered in previous games, and I’m still gonna play it like the idiot I am. And I’m gonna love every second of it. Why would I play a game in a series that I claim is so boring? Why am I slave to such base desires? Well? Can you tell me? Because I don’t know. The 30-40 hours I’m gonna spend playing that game and experiencing the story of Star Wars yet again could be spent enjoying a new experience. Ah. Hold up. That’s something I find myself saying a lot. Why spend my time doing X thing I’ve already done when I could be experiencing something new? I get caught up a lot in thinking about how to maximize my time in a day when it comes to media consumption. If I’m gonna game for 3 hours tomorrow, what game should I play? Should I keep playing Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, even though I beat all the story quests? Do I finally build that Creeper farm I’ve been meaning to build in my friend’s Minecraft server? Should I return to Creeper World 4 and finish the last mission of the game? Is it finally gonna be the day I’m gonna start playing Trails in the Sky 2? The most appealing choice in that list is starting The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky 2. It’s a series with 9 games, and I’ve only beaten 1. I wish I could stop saying it’s something I’d like to play and just fuckin play it. That’s the ideal choice. But what happens in reality? The most likely choice is that I launch up Minecraft with some Summoning Salt video on my other monitor, and just run around my world gathering stuff from my farms and wander aimlessly. I think it can be boiled down to overchoice with maybe a hint of depression. Overchoice is a psychological effect where you have a hard time choosing something when presented with multiple options of roughly equal value. If you’ve stared at a restaurant menu for a while, unable to choose something, then you’ve experienced overchoice. I don’t know how many people experience this in regards to media, but it’s something that I struggle with a lot. Beyond gaming, it affects me in movies, TV shows, and books to an extent. And I’m not even a reader. I’d love to become more of a reader, if only to divorce myself from electronics a little bit. But it’s so hard to choose a book to read and then stick with it to the end. To tie it back to gaming, I have less of a problem with finishing games than I do with actually starting them. I use the site HowLongToBeat to track games that I beat and what games I want to play in the future, and it’s been an interesting journey adding games to my lists. My backlog on the site is sitting at 224 games. And that’s nowhere close to the amount of games that I think I’d like if I played. That’s just the tippy top of the list of games that I’d like to play some time in my life. Now look, I’m not an idiot. I know I’m not going to play even a fraction of the games on that list. If I’m being honest with myself, I’m never going to play Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2. It’s an experience I’d love to have under my belt, but man. CRPGs are really hard for me to get into. I have a hard enough time sticking with books, but CRPGs are on another level to me. There’s an innumerable amount of games that I’d “like to have under my belt”. I don’t even know what the point is of listing them all out like that. I don’t look at the list when I decide I want to play something new. The idea to play it just pops into my mind after seeing a YouTube video mention it, a friend recommends it, or a sequel is coming out and I want to get caught up to play that new game. The amount of series that I’ve discovered a love for after playing through because of an upcoming sequel is insane. I played all of Metal Gear Solid series before MGS V came out. I didn’t really like the game all that much, but I’m glad at least that it was made, else its likely I wouldn’t have ever played the series. I played Final Fantasy 7 for the first time a few years ago when the remake was announced. I could tell this was gonna be a really big project from Squeenix, so I wanted to appreciate it from the perspective of someone with knowledge of the original game. And that led to me playing other Final Fantasy games. Hell, it helped me discover a love for traditional JRPGs in general, and led me to Dragon Quest XI, one of my favorite games of all time. This is gonna sound real stupid, but Poker Night 2 convinced me to watch the Evil Dead movies. I had a passing knowledge of the other properties in the game, but Evil Dead was something that eluded me over the years. So I watched it, just so I could pick up on whatever references are thrown out between characters, and ended up loving Evil Dead 2. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time now. It’s something that happens a lot to me. I can’t deny that it’s led me to some really good pieces of media, but it really does feel like a weight on my chest sometimes. Do I need to play every Final Fantasy game in a row? What if I play 12, then go back to 3 and think it’s too simplistic? What if I play 9 before 8 and can’t get into it because of the lack of quality of life enhancements that were added in 9? Is anyone else like that? I think I saw someone else say that too somewhere years ago, so I don’t think it’s just me. Well, it’s probably just me and that dude. That whole tangent isn’t necessarily related to overchoice, more-so overthinking, but it’s in the same realm. Do I really need to play every single mainline Final Fantasy game at all? Am I gonna remember anything from Final Fantasy 1 months after beating it? Spoilers, I played it months ago, and the only thing I remember about it was I hated playing on my vita. Not sure what lesson should be taken from that, hopefully someone can tell me. To rope it back in, how can we fight overchoice? Because the amount of games to choose from is only going to go up from here, and if you include previous generations, then there’s already more games than anyone could play in their whole life. There’s a concept that I think’s worth looking at called choice minimization. Choice minimization is where you attempt to, you guessed it, minimize the amount of choices you have to make. Probably the most popular example of choice minimization is the wardrobes of a lot billionaires. Ever notice how people like Mark Zuckerburg and Steve Jobs wear something really simple nearly all the time? That’s an example of choice minimization. Mark Zuckerburg is almost always wearing just a t-shirt, and Steve Jobs is known for his black turtlenecks. The goal of minimizing the amount of choices you have to make in a day is to free up mental energy for making more important decisions. So Steve Jobs would just pick out one of like a billion turtle necks when he gets up in the morning and not even have to consider what type of outfit “he’s feeling today”. It’s turtleneck day, just like yesterday. So how can we apply that to gaming? I’m gonna tell y’all what I would do if I were to really dedicate myself to minimizing choices, but your experience might be different. So feel free to take pieces from my hypothetical plan to build your own. For me, the goal is to spend less time agonizing over what to play, and just fuckin play something. If I were trying to minimize the number of choices I had to make, I think the first thing to do would be to make a list of every game I’m REALLY interested in playing. I already made a list of games I’m “interested” in playing on my HowLongToBeat profile, but I think going a step further and narrowing that list down to like 50 games would be a good idea. Here’s where it branches out. A while back, I tried listing out every game I wanted to play in order. When I finished the game in spot #1, I’d move on to #2. I think that could work with some people, but it didn’t really work for me. It felt too much like work at that point. I kinda like going where the wind pushes me and just picking what I want in the moment. There’s a lot of sites out there that will give you a random game to play from your Steam Library, or you could even just use a generic site to pick a random thing from a list you copy and paste in. That’s for the more chaotic people out there, but it’s also something that didn’t really vibe with me. After getting a random game, I’d almost always just randomize if I wasn’t 100% on board with playing it. And I’d do it again. And again. And I’d just go through 10-20 random game selections until I was bored and just went to play Terraria. So what else is there? I… uh… don’t know. I haven’t figured out the best way to deal with this feeling, this… craving to play as many games as possible. It’s such a bizarre feeling. My backlog grows every day as more games come out and I discover more games from previous generations. So are games too plentiful? Of course not. Claiming that there’s too many video games is nonsense. But man, does it ever feel like there is. Thanks for watching y’all. I’m glad at least someone was able to sit through my minor existential crisis here. I don’t really know what the point of this video is, but if I can at least get a few people talking in the comments that feel the same way, then I’ll know it provided some value. I also wanna know the game or series that you’ve always wanted to play. Some people may not have as big of a problem as I do, but I bet everyone has that one thing they’ve always wanted to get into. For me it’s Yakuza. I own practically every Yakuza-styled game on PlayStation, except for Yakuza 7 and Judgement. I beat 3 and 4 many years ago, but I’d love to start from 0. Hopefully I get around to it someday. Maybe I’ll do a video on the series if that ever happens. Again, thank you so much for watching, see you on the flip.