Games are on my mind as my wife and I head to Boston for PAX East this week, and this post came out of thinking about how I try to prioritize game time in my life. Games have always been my first love when it comes to hobbies, I quickly became obsessed with them during my pre-school years and the desire to play everything I can has burned ever since. And recently I have been thinking about how much time I should continue to devote to what I like to call my perpetual games.
There are basically three kinds of games for me. One, the games I tend to play once and enjoy, but not enough to warrant a replay. A good recent example is Spider-Man, which I reviewed a couple months ago. I played the heck out of that game, and I eagerly await a potential sequel, but I've done everything there is to do, so I feel no need to revisit it. Two, the games I enjoy so much that I think about replaying them often. The Uncharted games are all like this for me. I just love the cinematic quality of them so much that I will gladly experience them over and over again. Other examples are old Mario and Zelda games, the gameplay is so good in them that it’s still satisfying just to get to the end. And three, the games that I play consistently for years, mostly because I'm trying to get better at them.
I think most people who play games have or have had at least one perpetual game. For many people my age, World of Warcraft was (or still is) that game. Competitive games with high skill caps also tend to become perpetual games for people, games like Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, Madden, League of Legends, Starcraft, and so on. Games that are so good that you never want to stop playing them, or games where you want to be the best you can be against other players. They also tend to be games that you can't actually finish because there's no specific end goal.
For me, I've really only had three games that I would consider to be perpetual games, and two of them are really series of games rather than just a single one.
The first, and by far the longest perpetual game for me, has been the Rock Band series. I could also include the Guitar Hero series in that since it started my rhythm game obsession. But even if you dismiss the GH games, I played Rock Band 1/2/3 for a full decade before I finally had to give it up moving to New York. Even then, I do still have the game and all the connectors needed to play it, I just don't have the instruments anymore.
The Rock Band games are super important to me for several reasons. The most obvious one is that I am literally a musician today because of it. I straight up learned to play drums because of Rock Band, and I used that skill to create two albums of original music with some of my best friends. That alone makes the Rock Band series one of the best things that's ever happened to me. And aside from the drums, it also helped with sparking my current interests in picking up guitar and piano as well.
The other great thing that Rock Band did for me was introduce me to a ton of music that I wouldn't have tried otherwise. My first exposure to one of my favorite bands, Coheed and Cambria, was through Rock Band. That's the one that stands out the most, but there have been a bunch of bands that I got into because of the games. Bands like Dragonforce, Dream Theater, The Fratellis, Kaiser Chiefs, and even Rush.
And when it comes right down to it, playing drums and seeing myself get better and better at it over the years, there is nothing like that. Being able to rock out to a bunch of my favorite music while doing so is just icing on the cake. It's only been a few months since I had to give up the drumming for the foreseeable future, but I think about it everyday.
The second perpetual game on my list is helping me through the withdrawals though. It's not really a surprise, given my history with Guitar Hero and Rock Band, that Rocksmith (mostly the 2014 version) is something I latched onto right away when it came out and I've been playing it regularly since. Rock Band 3 tried to do the learn-to-play-real-guitar thing, but it ultimately didn't work for me and I switched over to Rocksmith immediately. And just like how I learned to play drums from Rock Band, I can honestly say Rocksmith has done a ton to make me an okay guitar player. I will never be as good at guitar as I am at drums, but it's still a lot of fun and rewarding seeing the progress. At this point, I basically have to take what I can get, and I try to devote at least one day a week to playing this so I don't get rusty. I'm still waiting for the similar killer game for learning piano (there are game-like apps for piano available, but they just don't get the feel right).
The third perpetual game is the only actual multiplayer game I've ever tried to get good at. I've always been more of a single-player, narrative-focused gamer, so multiplayer games come and go quickly for me. I learned through high school and college that I'll never be a good FPS or RTS player, and I don't enjoy sports games. In the competitive gaming scene, that doesn't leave much else aside from fighting games, and I'm even worse at those than the above (though I do like them). But I did manage to find one game that I really like to play and want to get better at: Heroes of the Storm.
I've been playing HotS pretty consistently for over two years at this point, and I still think about it all the time. I spend a good amount of time watching other people play it and talk about it to try to get better at it. Like other MOBAs, the skill of playing different characters is only one part of the equation, you need to be good at reading the situation as well, which is where watching other people play helps a lot. That being said, I'm still not very good at the game. If my ranking is to be believed, I'm in the bottom 25% of the player base, but it doesn't bother me too much. The game is still fun whether my team is winning or losing, each game is a learning experience and I get better.
The only real problem with playing HotS is that it has been on the ropes in terms of whether it will be around much longer. The team working on it was cut quite a bit and all of the official tournament play around the game went away. This has caused a large part of the player base to move on. The way I look at it, I still like playing the game, and I will just keep doing that until it goes away or I find something better. If it does happen to die, then I guess my time with MOBAs will be done for a while and I will get some time back for other things.
There are a few other games in my sphere right now that could potentially be perpetual games, but don’t quite hit that sweet spot I’m looking for. I'm working through Destiny 2 when I can, but I feel that I'm going to be done with that as soon as the story content is done. Returning to a post from a while ago, Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms and Neverwinter are also still very much in my rotation. I don't think Idle Champions can ever be a perpetual game because it's not much of a game to begin with, there is no getting better at it. It will be a game I keep having in the background until there's nothing left to do in it, and then I will move on. Neverwinter is still early enough that it could become that MMO I play for a long time, but I doubt that as well for similar reasons as Destiny 2. Once the sense of progression ends, I will probably move on to something else (maybe actually play WoW?).
Anyway, there wasn't much of a real point to this post, just needed something to write about. I have a few things in the hopper that I hope I can write about in the coming weeks.