This month, I have been mostly playing… sod all.
For some reason, since the release of Dead Rising in September my gaming libido has been in decline. Maybe it’s zombie overkill (like that could ever happen!), or the exciting TV schedule (yeah, do I look like an ‘I’m a Celeb’ fan?) but for some reason the call of my Xbox has definitely been muted.
I still, like many gamers, have a stack of unfinished games, some of which I ran to the nearest game shop for on release day; the fact that many of them are now £20 cheaper and in a buy 2 for £30 offer just rubs a bit of salt into my wounds.
Final Fantasy XIII, despite years of waiting for it to be released, still has my team of outlaws hauled up on the Palamecia. Tomb Raider: Underworld, if you can believe it, has Lara trapped in Coastal Thailand limbo. Hell, my N3 game temporarily revived itself with the thought of possibly buying its recent sequel once it was completed, but subsequently died a death again when I realised I couldn’t be bothered to get everyone up to level 9, when I could be watching Edwardian Farm on BBC2 and learning how they used to manufacture quick lime… true story!
On occasion, I have dabbled in some online co-op of Dead Rising 2, just to finish off getting the 1000 points up for grabs, but it feels more like going through the motions than really driving for a sense of true achievement or purpose… but that’s when I had my breakthrough.
I am definitely not the first, and certainly won’t be the last to claim that achievements have changed the way games are played, but the more I come to assess my own gaming patterns of late the more I come to realise how much it has changed my views on my own skills as a gamer. Back in the day (pick any day you want really, but probably somewhere along the lines of circa 1996-2005) I would happily purchase a game, run through it once or twice (or a gazillion times if it was something like Resident Evil!) and consider it job done and revel in my success of completion.
More recently, I tend to pop a disc into my console and before I have even played for longer than half an hour, I hit my ‘Home’ button to find out “exactly what do I have to do to unlock a few points around here?”. Where is my drive? Where is my passion? If you had told me four years ago that I would have accumulated a gamerscore of over 40,000 I would have gone “Wow!”. Now I start to wonder exactly how many K’s ago that the damage was done and I started playing for achievements rather than for the game itself.
I want my enthusiasm back. I want to get a game, and instead of playing for a few hours and wondering why my score is no higher, I want to be so engrossed by a story or the gameplay that I forget to go to bed on time. I wish I could say that I will be banning myself from my Xbox 360 and trying to relive my glory days on the consoles of yesteryear, but I know that probably won’t last for long, and that’s really not the problem.
What I need to do is just not care about points anymore.
So here it is, my New Year’s resolution, six weeks early…
Next year I want to play games for games’ sake. Not for points, not for gamertag glory, and not for justification that I can still be called a gamer even though I’m a girl (that is just so ’90s) or because I don’t have as many achievements as the next person.
Play for good, play for evil, play for shooting the opposite team in the back of the head because you’ve earned your skill to be able to do it and it’s also kinda funny. Play through a game from start to end because it’s just that good… not because I might get 10G if I do.
I want to play because I love it… It’s a long shot, but I just might do it.
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