Chill out connrrr! Aggressively!!!
I‘m in and out of this boat all the time, and I don’t think it really helps that I keep a written list of all the things I‘m currently playing, plus a list of things I’m “in the middle of” but which are “on hold” and which I “could finish, one day, maybe”; eventually these spill over into my written list of “need to restart, if I play this again, which I will, or I could, and maybe I should? One day, maybe.”
I got sidetracked just now by a feeling of intense déjà vu that I‘d already written about how I got like 25 hours into Okami before dropping it, and forget what I was going to say. Have I “really” played Okami? I was like 14 then anyway. I don’t think about it. Do I have a properly holistic view of the game-ography of Hideki Kamiya if I haven’t finished Okami? No, but who cares.
Sometimes this weird dumb pressure to finish games is socially imposed. You‘re “not allowed” to talk about a game unless you’ve finished it (although no one is forcing me to believe people who make this claim… is it socially imposed? am I doing this to myself?). That’s fair enough I guess but only matters when determining who has however much authority to speak on what the content of a game is. You can always talk about your experience, whatever it is.
Your experience with something exists regardless of how long it was or how “deep.” If the experience isn‘t rewarding, why prolong it? To push the boundaries of your taste? To be better informed? For social capital? For a sense of closure? Because you’ll feel like you wasted 30 invested hours if you don‘t finish it? Don’t force yourself to play a whole list of games in release order if you’re just interested in the 9th one. ;)
I got two hours into Mundaun and had a good time with those two hours but now it‘s sitting their installed on my computer and I don’t want to finish it (stealth/combat is bad and there‘s more of it to come). “But it’s only a few more hours, just finish it.” NO!
I enjoy long games to be sure but I‘m trying to get better about knowing when to quit them. The other day I decided to shelve a book, on purpose, at 90 pages in, with no intention of ever finishing it. I haven’t done that in years, it felt great.
Nailing this to the door of my post
