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(Let me know if I've made a thread like this before.)

This is kinda bugging me these days.

So there are those games that you can just pick up, as in start playing, whenever. You can just drop them whenever too. With these sorts of games, you rarely have to worry about things like social obligations getting in the way, or being too mentally involved with remembering details or strategizing in them to be able to think about something else. Gameplay might be in bursts of at most a few minutes at a time. These typically include (but are not limited to) so-called "casual" games.

Then there are those games that really take up a lot of mental RAM, so to speak. You really think hard about strategy or planning, or it's really immersive and your attention can really get sucked into it (or alternatively, it's just no fun if you don't have immersion).

I really enjoy the latter category, much more than I enjoy the former. But I find that it's harder and harder for me to find time to appreciate that latter category, to have blocks of time when I don't have to worry about stuff and can just sit down and enjoy a game to the exclusion of dealing with my obligations.

...discuss, I guess. What type of game do you prefer, and when? What does it mean to be a gamer, relative to these two types of games? Do you feel that it's gradually harder for you to enjoy games of the latter type?

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Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )

I don't really know what you're asking. Is it games that are easy to start v games that are difficult to start?

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Scepticism, that dry rot of the intellect, had not left one entire idea in his mind.

Me on the Starcraft.

Kind of, but also stopping them.

Here's an example: I can start playing Minesweeper pretty much anytime on my computer, and I can "pause" it anytime by simply going to another screen or turning to something else (all the gameplay-relevant info is easily accessible--it's just the arrangement of those numbers and unopened blocks), and I have minimal incentive to finish the game other than for the sake of finishing it. (In the Windows 7 version it tracks your wins; quitting counts as a loss. But given that the game sometimes throws you mine arrangements that force you to guess, it doesn't really matter anyway.)

On the other hand, if I'm going to play some Fire Emblem, I'm going to pick up my save file where I left off, which means checking out my entire team, inventory, levels and experience, stats, and all, then starting the next chapter mission, looking carefully at the enemies' stats and classes and items and placement, thinking hard about the placement of my own units, remembering my strategy (who goes first/second/etc. and does what action), thinking several steps ahead to predict what enemies could do, how to defeat them in such a way that certain of your units get their item drops or stealable items (and pass them along to in case their inventory is full), ...and much more.

So Minesweeper is much more appropriate than Fire Emblem if you have, say, five minutes to spare and are bored.

This post has been edited by Glenn Magus Harvey on 7th March 2012 23:29

--------------------

Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )