Random Roar: Choice Paralysis and Retrospective Articles

 

Man, I’m bored and I have nothing to play.

Well, okay, that’s not true.  It’s not like I’ve played through every single game in my Steam library, and there are plenty of games I’ve yet to purchase that I’m keeping track of on my wish list.  That’s how I know when one or more of them are on sale.  Steam will often send me an E-mail to let me know when they’ve been temporarily discounted, and these sales on Steam happen very often.

I’ve even got a method to guarantee I finish games.  Steam in my computer’s Start menu tells me what my last fives games were, and I’m in the process of casually playing through all five of them.  Once one of those games are done, I have many more waiting in the wings as replacements in my list.

But that’s Steam.  I don’t feel like playing on my laptop right now and I have absolutely nothing to play on my consoles.

Except that’s not true either.  I’ve got one game I’ve started on PlayStation 4 recently which I’ve been enjoying so far.  The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics is apparently not a good game, according to players who partake in a lot of tactical RPGs and I think even fans of the cinematic franchise (those who have seen both the movie and the Netflix series) consider it a watered down, lukewarm version of events.

But that’s the thing.  Yes, it’s not as complex as, say, the Disgaea series or Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics, but sometimes you want to figure out a complex map and keep plugging away until you succeed, and sometimes you just want to fling troops at enemies until they die and have battles be over in ten minutes.  (You can get that in Disgaea too, but it takes a lot more effort to get to that point in the game first.)  Fire Emblem is the kind of game you play if you want to enjoy the video game equivalent of a steak dinner, and The Dark Crystal‘s game is basically popcorn.

Not only that, but after I finish The Dark Crystal, I have a wealth of choice I can pick from.  My huge pile of games has been growing and now covers many more consoles than the last time I took stock of it.

I think the problem for a lot of us is not that we don’t have anything to play, it’s that we don’t know what we feel like playing, and we might also not know for how long we’ll be allowed to go for until real life gets in the way again.  This may also be why it’s harder to select something to watch on Netflix.  It’s funny that two hours is such an ask these days.

Even if you do know what you want to play, games have been getting more complicated, even in the same series, or merely the same genre.  If you were one of the few who heard of RPGs before Final Fantasy VII made them somewhat mainstream, most of the ones we played here in North America were pretty similar to one another.  Two teams faced each other and took turns until one side was dead.  Nowadays, RPGs feel the need to innovate gameplay or keep people engaged for far longer, and that isn’t always fun for players who just want to have some mindless menu based action.

Getting back to the above example, it’s not uncommon for battles in Fire Emblem to last up to an hour of careful planning and maneuvering.  You can suspend games in the middle of battle, but that’s not always optimal if you’re trying to follow a strategy on one day and you forget what that strategy was the next.  Or you might have the time to spend an hour playing, but it’s a tough battle and you definitely don’t want to waste your time if you make that one error near the end or are caught in a bad situation and the enemy gets a lucky hit in and your entire hour is wasted.  And even if you’re reasonably assured of your victory, you might want more than just one battle, just one taste of glory.

This is also a good reason why many people have an unfinished pile of games that they’re possibly never going to get back to.  Often times, when you do pick a game back up that you haven’t played in a while, you’ve forgotten what you were doing and decide it’s not worth starting over because it already took twenty hours to get to where you stopped at.

Choice paralysis is very hard to deal with.  You might want to play the recently released Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory or dip into your backlog and finally play Ni No Kuni, Ar tonelico II, or maybe you still haven’t tried The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time even though you have it and you want to give it a spin sometime.  It would be one thing if today’s your birthday and you received one game and so the choice was made for you.  It’s another thing entirely if you’ve been stacking these games up as you get them since you’re certain you’re going to play them “someday”, but now you want to play them all and you know you don’t have the time and need to choose one of them.

I don’t know that I have an effective solution, unfortunately.  I know a friend who puts the choice literally out of his hands and uses a random number generator to determine the next game he plays from his backlog.  For me, what I’ve done is to ignore my backlog and start writing retrospective articles about games I’ve already played.

This is not a better solution, admittedly, since it keeps me from playing any of the games in my backlog for long stretches of time, but there are times when I definitely feel burnout beginning, so I’ll play something else for a bit before getting back to the project.  It’s not a perfect solution, since I have a pile of unfinished games that might take a couple years of nonstop playing to get through, but I like to think it helps keep me motivated.

It also helps that it’s a partial solution for craving old school RPG gameplay and not having a lot of that in my pile of games.  I can once again enjoy the entire old school Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest library while writing about them and when I start to feel burnout, I can choose instead to pick a game up off my backlog and play it to completion.

I wish I could offer a definitive solution, but I guess the main reason choice paralysis is so bad is because everyone requires their own solution for it, but they’re the only ones who can figure out what’ll work.  Bribe yourself with take-out pizza for each game you finish, maybe?  I don’t know.  But if you’re bored and think you don’t have anything to play, it’s probably just that you don’t feel like playing what you have.