The Plan for 2022
Game Pass, Steam sales, Playstation Plus, Humble Bundles, and so many more have contributed to a rise in the number of games that we have available to us that we’ve never played. Sometimes we even just buy a game to support the developer or encourage publishers to continue making a certain kind of game. (I’m not the only one that does this, right?) However it happens, it means we have a library of games that aren’t touched, and with the breakneck pace of games being released these days, that number usually rises more than it falls.
In 2022 I’d like to change that, for me personally. I’ll still be playing the games I’ve been playing – the ongoing things like Destiny 2, the casual race in Forza Horizon 5, even just a quick pick-up-and-play skirmish in Halo Wars – but I’m going to be more intentional in spending time with the games I already own but haven’t beaten yet. I don’t imagine I’ll get through them all, but that’s where my focus is going to be. To aid in that goal, I’m going to be limiting myself to one game purchase in the calendar year as well. I’m not sure yet where DLC falls in this plan (and I’ve already pre-ordered the Witch Queen expansion anyway…), but I’m going to keep game purchases generally to a minimum. This will help with saving some money and keeping me focused on what I already own. Limiting myself to a single new game this year will also, I think force me to evaluate my options more critically rather than simply picking up whatever I can at launch. Although let’s be honest, if Breath of the Wild 2 comes out this year, that’s what I’ll end up buying.
The other thing that I’m going to be doing more intentionally during this process is to reflect on the games that I’m playing. I don’t want to mindlessly check games off a list and simply move onto the next. While that might be efficient, it almost turns games into a chore, which is the last thing I want. So as I beat a game, before I move on to the next, I’m going to be writing down my thoughts on it. Once upon a time I would have thought finding “meaning in games” was the pursuit of someone with too much time on their hands and too many unused high dollar vocabulary words. These days though, at least as far as what I’m planning to do, it’s about being intentional about what I’m consuming, and really pausing to think on what I liked and why, how I feel about it, and the way that a game perhaps impacts my thought processes, either on other games or more generally. Because games, like everything else, don’t exist in a vacuum, devoid of influence from the things around us. Neither are they strictly entertainment, never leaking into other parts of our lives.
I don’t know how regular this will be. I have a decent amount of time that I can spend as I like, but there are other things that occupy that outside of games. I’m hoping to beat at least a couple of games a month, but who knows how that’ll go with some of the big open world games. I’m not going to limit my posts here to only older games, so hopefully we’ll get more than a couple posts a month here. But we’ll see how it goes.
Addendum: I’ll try to note via the tags on a post whether or not a given game comes from my existing library, Game Pass, or elsewhere. I’ll also try to include whether or not there are spoilers that I’m talking about, but if you want to be on the safe side, just assume I’m going to spoil something.