Blogging about games becomes harder

There was a time for me when blogging about games was easy. I was gaming almost daily and my time spent in front of a console or PC games machine probably averaged two or three hours per day, seven days per week.

Somewhere along the line, however, it became harder. I read an article by Aywren on their blog on this very topic and started considering a bit more why game blogging has become such a slog for myself. My problem seems different than what Aywren describes and isn’t complicated, but it is frustrating and disappointing to myself at least.

Less gaming

As I mentioned above, I used to game for two or three hours per day. This didn’t always result in something suitable to write about, but it did give me plenty of things to consider on the gaming front. I could complete a good-sized RPG game in a month at that rate, and the experiences would still be fresh in my mind from beginning to end.

More recently I have had less time in front of a gaming machine. My console and gaming PC both collect dust in my former office, waiting for attention that rarely comes. I have a hard time understanding why exactly this is the case: I’m retired now, and so is my wife- I should have plenty of time for gaming.

But the truth is more complex than that. The types of games I like to play, the large sprawling single player RPGs, seem to come along less frequently than they once did. There are no Mass Effects, Skyrims, or Witchers coming out every year. Games that used to take two or three years to develop now take the better part of a decade. This means a dearth of the kinds of games that draw me to the computer and keep me occupied enough to produce some new content.

The other factors are a bit strange and directly affect how much time I have for gaming activities. I’ve found that it is challenging to step away from my life (and wife) to play games the way I used to. My wife is here every day now that she is retired, and she is demanding of my time. She wants to sit down in front of the TV together, and I like that too. And she is prone to staying up a little later, and I go to sleep a bit earlier than I used to. So the hours I used to dedicate to gaming have been consumed by other things. Those 40 or 60 hour games now take two or three months to finish, and by the time I’m done I’ve largely forgotten what the beginning experience was really like.

The challenge of writing

The same factors that reduce my time for gaming have also reduced my time for writing. The evening and late night hours are reduced due to my need for regular sleep related to my mental health issues. And with both Irene and I being retired there are more hours spent together instead of separately. This is a somewhat surprising but generally positive outcome for both of us, and I just need to figure out how best to manage it.

Another factor that limits my time writing is a personal sense of incompetence. More and more “popular” games today leave me in the dust in terms of their difficulty curve. A good example of this is Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, a game I enjoyed right up until the point progression became an insurmountable obstacle for me. I feel that I haven’t gotten worse at gaming, but that we are in a moment in the gaming hobby when difficulty is ascendant, where Souls-likes are more popular than Mass Effect-likes, and that does not suit my play style.

Finding time

As they say, you can always find time for the things that are important to you- and I have some ideas how I can carve out more hours for gaming and game blogging. One of them is to do some time shifting: to stay up later and sleep in later each day. I have to be careful with this one as it is easy to get woken up in the AM in our house with all the animal chores that need doing early each day. And I can’t afford to harm my mental health by adopting poor sleep habits.

I also need to be more diligent about keeping good notes while I game. This will hopefully allow me to refresh my memory of the early parts of a game two or three months later on when I actually finish it with my reduced gaming hours.

Another way to find more time is for both Irene and I to accept that there are set times when I won’t be sharing the couch with her, but instead will be gaming. Maybe we can make this into specific days or hours that suit her schedule, times when she naturally will be doing other things or can otherwise be on her own. Gaming together is always a possibility as well, but we are so different in terms of gaming preferences that I’m not sure that would work out for us.

I also think I will do more blogging about games without actually playing the games. Things like commenting on industry news and upcoming game announcements doesn’t require the double duty of both playing the game and writing about it. I’ve done a bit of that during this Blaugust and found I sort of enjoyed simply responding to a development in the industry.

I would be happy if I could consistently write one or two gaming posts a month. Not exactly stellar performance, but better than my usual production rate for the last year or so at least. I suspect there will only be two or three new games a year that I will play to enough depth to offer opinions on, but some years may be busier than that. So the majority of my posts would be industry commentary, which I think I can find enough to talk about for something most months.

The header image for this post is AI generated with ChatGPT- that explains the third arm, I guess…