Healthy Gaming Habits

[EposVox]

As I’ve progressed through my burnout and transitioned more and more to focusing on my gaming-related work as my primary outlet again, I’ve spent a lot more time playing games.
It’s been nice! Early this year, I blasted through Don’t Stop, Girlypop! in the week of its launch. Later I finished Luna Abyss in just a few days, Denshattack! in the week leading up to its release, then Halo: Campaign Evolved and so on. Plus my wife and I are some 80-odd hours into our Horizon: Forbidden West playthrough, dropped about 70 hours into Overwatch (formerly Overwatch 2, formerly Overwatch) when we took a break from Horizon, I’ve nearly completed a Pokemon Fire Red run on my Switch, and put countless hours into various roguelites and such. All while also having the time to introduce my kid to Pokemon Let’s Go, Eevee, ParaLives, Portal, and some PS2 classics.

[I’ve also been trying to find a mobile game that gives me happy button feelings. Tried Pokemon Shuffle Mobile: I felt drawn to keep logging in and playing when my moves reset, but the game feels soulless and doesn’t make me feel anything, so I’m uninstalling.]

Currently, I’ve been making my way through a playthrough of The Lord of the Rings: War in the North Legacy Edition. (I’m pretty sure this game has the longest title in my Steam library.) It’s been great. I’m about 10 hours in, maybe halfway through the game.
To me, this is some serious, hardcore gaming time. More than I’ve had squished together in years. Combined with my insane number of demos I’ve tried for the various Next Fests.. I’m pretty sure my Steam Replay this year is going to be bananas. I’ve not gamed like this in a long while; I’ve even had entire work days dedicated to just blasting through some of these games for review, only allocating a small amount of time to responding to emails, packing up shop orders, etc.

And yet… I don’t seem to come close to the internet-projected-average gamer’s hours?! Despite spending the bulk of my work days playing this LOTR re-release, I’m still not finished meanwhile within a few days we seemingly have quite a few people posting reviews having fully beaten the game or people posting screenshots on Steam of the very late game stuff. (I know it’s a re-release, I’ve played it before too, but these seem to be people who have already made their way through the new release copy.)
I know the internet filters the most extreme to the top and skews things, but it’s really hard not to feel like everyone around you it spending every waking hour playing through games, and I just have to wonder… how?! I’m spending my spare moments playing TerraTech Legion on my PC or Steam Deck, or Fire Red on my Switch, when my kid isn’t at school and I’m playing LOTR - and yet I still seemingly don’t keep up?
This is feeling reminiscent of school years when it felt like all my friends were blasting through games meanwhile the few hours a week I could squeeze in left me far behind.

(Did anyone catch this gag in my Halo video?)

Now, it is important to note that there’s no competition for “gamer hours” and comparing how much you play to anyone else isn’t productive or useful in any way. I’m not really doing that here, just trying to calibrate my perspective.

I’ve been logging thoughts on nearly every game I’ve played this year in a dedicated notebook (I’ll share more on that as we reach the end of the year) but thus far I’ve tried/played 120+ games in 2026. I’ve had a blast and am more stoked on games as a hobby, industry, idea, than ever before, despite everything going on in the industry. And it’s hard to imagine how you wouldn’t be. There’s so much damn good stuff out there to play that I will never run out of.

But I have to imagine… if you’re someone who is somehow doubling, tripling (or more) game time than I’m currently getting: You’ve gotta be neglecting life. I still have to be a dad. I still have to cook dinner, keep up with the house, make some progress at my job, be a good spouse, mow the grass (admittedly haven’t done that much this summer), sleep, watch some TV, maintain a tiny bit of time in other hobbies. I have to imagine if you’re neglecting everything else and not taking care of YOU then it’s harder for games to feel good. If you’re not maintaining a healthy baseline that you operate from, and then rely on games to both escape from life and maintain that baseline, you’re not going to feel good. Combine that with speeding through every ounce of gaming content you can soak up, and maybe it doesn’t feel like you’ll never run out of good games like I feel?

A Busy Life Is A Fulfilled Life

This whole experience just kinda makes me sad for people who aren’t maintaining healthy boundaries. I said it in a video earlier this year, but gaming always feels its best to me when I’ve got a lot of things going on and it’s effortless to only prioritize what is the most fun when I do get to play. I wish childhood had done a better job of teaching everyone else that, I guess. There’s so much projected discontent with gaming as a hobby online, where I think most people are just unhappy with their lives and gaming isn’t the problem. (Nor are the “hair-dyed women and wokies” as so many people keep claiming lately.)

[agizmo]

I’m always at the bottom end of the spectrum. I’ve played 10 different games this year and completed 7. A lot of this comes down to time and energy. I’ve had a rough year+ that finally pushed me to use therapy benefits through work and rework savings. I’m finally getting to a point where, “I can step out of my own way and towards things I can enjoy.” It’s not going to get filled with only gaming, but there may be a little bit of time devoted to it. There’s a lot of other things on the bucket list I need to be crossed off.

[EposVox]

Hey, for all the games I’ve tried and played, I’m pretty sure I’ve finished fewer than 7! That’s worth something.

[BerrieV]

I always compare it with food; I personally really enjoy eating watermelon. But the thing is, if I didn’t eat anything else but watermelon, I’d get fed up with it very quickly and would probably not want to eat it again.

This was the same for me with gaming, the only thing I did after work was gaming, while neglecting all my other hobbies and even myself in some ways. Realizing that this was not the right way to game or to life live basically, has to be my biggest discovery of the past year.

I started working on myself, helping my parents with basic errands in and around the house, cooking, … Just basically prioritizing the right things at the right time and setting boundaries on how much time/money to spent on certain hobbies to make them feel fresh and to not drain out on them.

[MrJericho]

I also notice I enjoy gaming a lot more when there are boundaries around it. If I need to choose between a half hour gaming session at the end of the day while are the chores are done (or the most important ones, there’s always more things you can do in a house…) I enjoy it much more then if I skip on some chores and play for 1.5 hours.

I also discovered in the past weeks that I don’t need to be playing a game every time. I was recently playing some Doom (2016) and after 5 hours in I started to get bored and instead of jumping straight into a next game, I didn’t start a new one and did some other things instead, such as doing a deep clean of our garage and kitches fridges…

[BerrieV]

Exactly! In Dutch we have this saying “‘Te‘ is nooit goed, alleen '‘Tevreden‘“ where “Te“ is “Too“ (as in too much, too little, …) and “Tevreden“ means “Content“ or like “Satisfied“, so literally translated it means: “‘Too‘ is never good, only ‘Satisfied‘“ which obviously doesn’t work in English, since “Too“ is not in “Satisfied“ but it is in Dutch. I’ve possibly over-explained this and my imperfect English makes it worse but hey… you get the moral of the story I hope

[kyller3030]

There is an element of legacy skill to it, people that played a lot of souls-likes simply sprint through new releases in less time, (probably also skipping dialogue and not reading anything while at it… to be fair games with good writing are the exception).
I’m with Josh Strife Hayes on that “People place experience points over the point of the experience” like

• Torchlight Infinite having as a selling free-game point that you can complete the campaign in under 2 hours so you can get to the dailies or “endgame” gear treadmill faster makes me feel weird

I guess ADHD has some effects on this; not being able to form habits makes every game feel like the first time due to… calling it “skill issue” feels cliche so I’ll say “getting back in the train-mechanical-skill headspace” takes longer.
An upside is less genre fatigue due to not skipping straight to the endgame exhaustion on the first screenshot and the perk for making me immune to “dailies” addiction-bait tactics : P . (I’m just unable to confidently call an average game average, so I never drop a boring game because it’s “not that bad, it is endurable”. I’m chasing comfort over fun, I guess)

the internet-projected-average gamer’s hours

So on myanimelist there’s this phenomenon of later seasons of a series having larger and larger user ratings, since only the fans stuck with it. The average doesn’t count all the people that quit or dropped it.
More games media needs to talk about quit-moments. Not even as a complaint, apparently people tend to get attached harder to experiences that gave them issues to overcome (and a payoff on the other side) over smooth sailing. Perhaps that’s a quit moment too, when the game seems “solved” and there’s only a grey amorphous blob of “consistent work to get through” ahead.

“I’m aware that my job is to make something that will kill you and cause you to fail repeatedly. Until you learn how to deal with it.” ~ Riot CertainlyT https://youtu.be/mrJ7OPHiAPw&t=1211

[sondi]

shoutout to picking up journaling. I have one for just rambling my thoughts and one strictly for gaming and is kinda therapeutic to sit down with a coffee and reflect on a session. Or what your goals are going forward and what games you’re excited to play. It’s free from the echo chambers of social media and other people’s judgement, its just you and how you feel. It also gives you space away from the actual act of gaming. It feels like closure to me writing my thoughts on a game, and I’m not strict with structure, sometimes its me keeping track of side quest or writing my thoughts after a session, sometimes it me venting to myself about something stupid, or like a one line thought on a game.

I’ve been doing it since Sonic Frontiers came out (apparently that’s the first entry of the first book lol) and throughout the years, it’s made certain games more memorable. I feel like I have a fondness for every game I’ve ever written about, even the ones I gave a half star and said was ass.

I wish I was more creative with the presentation that you see all those bulletjo people do on pintrest, but it just doesn’t feel authentic to me. As someone that bulletjo in general as my daily planner, the simplicity (and having my journal and pen always around) makes it easier to get in and out. There was a time I was doing like everything even movies and tv episodes, but that got to a point where I was just writing just to write, and that time could be better spent actually writing about my thoughts of the day…or talking to my partner about what we watched or spent doing together…instead of writing about it lol.

Always going to encourage others to do it. PLUS continuing to practice your handwriting in this digital age is key!

[BerrieV]

The simplicity of this as well as your pretty handwriting make me want to go and buy a journal for gaming now lol. I do have a bullet journal for everyday thoughts and stuff like habit tracking and reflections of my day. For my gaming journal I use Backloggd atm.

While I do think this is a good site to just log a session and ramble about what I’ve done and about my thoughts, I do feel that in my experience writing stuff down always makes it that more memorable and enjoyable. I did set like a “rule“ for myself to log every session, so that’s where Backloggd is obviously easier and quicker to use, but idk, it still feels like it’s missing something. Maybe I’ll pick up a journal somewhere along the way and will just try it and see what happens. Thanks in advance for the advice and inspiration!

Are there any self-made “rules“ you follow for your gaming journal (like f.e. writing after every session, writing a review after every game completed, …) or do you just ramble and write what feels right? Just wondering since your journal seems pretty clean and organised to me.

[EposVox]

Yeah uh this is way neater and more organized than mine lol
mine are stream of consciousness notes while I play, combined with printouts and etc. as I get invested

[sondi]

the only rule I have is writing my thoughts and giving it a quick 5 star rating after I beat it. Its more so closure and not like a review like I would do on Loggd or something. ngl i started this year trying to do an every session thing or keeping it by my side for notes too instead and it scrambled everything and sent me in a spiral. I also use loggd, but a part of me is trying to get away from it. It’s good for a quick reference of what I’ve played and when, but lowkey getting tired of the social side. I just think the review part is what’s holding it back, because every thought about the game has the lens of the review and less of just talking about the game.

[BerrieV]

That’s exactly why Backloggd does not really feel right to me, since the review you write is public and there’s no way to make it visible only for you. I want my reviews and logs to be personal and mine. The social side is the bummer here. That’s why I would love to do it on paper, plus that makes it a lot more intentional. The downside is the effort you put in it but then again it probably feels more rewarding. Both of them have their ups and downs and that’s what I’m struggling with atm lol, but wouldn’t know for sure until I try both of course.

[EposVox]

TBF once you have a notebook, the effort of just writing down some thoughts isn’t any higher than digital, heh

[BerrieV]

Hmm yeah it’s probably also just more what you’re used to indeed. When it’s a habit or something you do more often, you’ll get used to it. Well I will def try it out and then we’ll see. Pretty excited to do so either way!