When I got back into gaming, I really got back into gaming. Throughout college, I had pursued a bunch of different interests. I studied religion, worked out, wrote poems, binge watched Netflix, performed parody songs, and spent a whole lot of time in the dining commons with my friends. In addition to all the, y'know, school work and work work. Gaming just didn't fit into my life.
But once I got out of college, I didn't have homework and I didn't live with a couple thousand of my st friends. That opened up time for some new interests and, it turned out, one interest ruled them all.
Games Are Long And Legion
Gaming is like any art form. Once you start learning more about it, you realize the sheer oceanic depths of your ignorance. Early dips into gaming podcasts were constant reminders of how much lurked beneath the constantly rippling surface of new releases. "What Remains of Edith Finch is a lot like Gone Home" is something I might have heard on a podcast in 2017, and as someone who hadn't played Gone Home, it added another point of interest to the map, another landmark I needed to track down if I wanted to have a geographic sense of the modern gaming landscape.
So I searched out ways to organize this pursuit. Podcasts, YouTube videos, and gaming sites are helpful because, if you engage with them regularly, you'll get a constant stream of information about new games that are worth your time and attention. If you want to learn about the history of the medium by playing older releases, a book like 1001 Video Games to Play Before You Die can be helpful, if a little overwhelming (and, in that particular book's case, more than a decade out of date). Alternatively, you can look up a top 100 list of the best games of all time and start working your way through all the ones you haven't played yet.
Getting Into Any Artform Takes Time
This is basically the same process required to build familiarity with any medium. And there are certain factors that make the process easier or harder for other artforms. Film isn't going to stump you or make you run to look up a guide. You might get bored during Sátántangó, but laying on your couch and watching a movie for 7.5 hours is a fundamentally easy thing to do, and you will finish the movie as long as you stay there. It requires nothing from you in order to complete it. If you walk away, the movie will keep on playing. That isn't the case in games, and the input required of the player makes older or more difficult games harder to holistically experience. Games are, on average, also significantly longer than movies.
Books have similar challenges. A book won't read itself, so difficulty is at play here, too. Like with film, you're just running your eyes over a surface, so you would expect it to be equally easy. But film keeps going whether you understand it or not, and not understanding something written in a book tends to get us stuck reading and rereading until we can make sense of it. That's a challenge, and there’s the additional problem that if you're interested in familiarizing yourself with literature as a whole, you have millennia to work with, not film's century or gaming's mere 50 years.
This is a lot to manage, and those three mediums are a fraction of the whole of all art that exists in the world. You could also get really into hip-hop or expressionist painting or salsa dancing or keyboard modding or sewing or barbecuing. But everything takes time. An hour I spend reading a George Saunders short story collection is time I'm not watching House of the Dragon. The two hours I spend seeing A Quiet Place: Day One in theaters is time I can't spend playing Rise of the Ronin. Interests are what make life worth living. But how do I find the perfect balance of maximal happiness and minimal FOMO? That is the thing I haven't figured out.
