Time and Enjoyment

Words: 1800 Approximate Reading Time: 10-15 minutes

A while back I started a new job, and a facet of that new job was having much less free time. Where before I was working a lot less and able to enjoy multiple days to myself, I now found myself working a more traditional 8-5 schedule five days a week. Since a bunch of that non-working time has to be spent still doing basic things like cleaning, cooking, eating, sleeping, and doing whatever else is needed to take care of myself, that leaves relatively little time for playing games. Still a decent amount, but nowhere near what I could put in before.

And of course, that can also be compared to being a kid. Even with school, we might have plenty of free time during the weekends, or during breaks. The sheer amount of time we had to play games was mostly limited by the choice of games we had – being kids, we couldn’t really afford new games at a whim, so we had to make do with what was available.

Ironically, of course, as we get older and work, we often wind up with the disposable income to buy games when we want them and wind up with a backlog…and in return have much less time.

But what I want to explore in this essay is how time – and the lack thereof – impacts how we perceive games and their “value.” Value is a complex topic because it can just as often hinge on calculating material cost as it can the actual quality of the experience that we get. But that specific conundrum is one I’ve already discussed.

Rather, my focus here is on how we think about our own time and how we might best spend it on games. Are we getting, so to speak, the best investment out of it? Of course, answering that question really requires digging into what the “best investment” would look like. And that in turn requires asking what is really precious to us.

Part of the reason I wanted to revisit this topic is how we all struggle with limited resources. The most obvious of which is money. Games are an expensive hobby. While they are strictly speaking a cheaper hobby today than they used to be, they still require a significant investment of funds, especially so if your plan is to play a wide range of games.

But another obvious resource that is limited is time. There are only 24 hours in a day, approximately 8 of which should be spent sleeping (I say “should” because we may not all be good about that). And for many people working standard jobs at 40 hours per week, that’s another 8 hours per day lost – almost certainly more because you’re likely losing an hour for lunch and also commuting to and from your place of work. So at most, you get 8 hours per day to play games…which then gets whittled down by other things. Cooking and eating. Basic self-care. Exercise. Family. Friends. The amount of time you might have on a given day might dwindle down to just a few. Maybe even some days you have no time.

It is that limited time which has become more prevalent in my own life as I have switched jobs. My original work which had me only physically gone two days a week and required work that could be split into manageable chunks was replaced with a standard office job. And that meant much less time to do other things. The consequence is that I find myself with less time to play games, and thus having to think more carefully about what I want to spend my time on – a task which itself takes time.

And so the promise of bigger and longer games that we see nowadays is one that is meant to appeal to the person whose primary constraint is money. If a game promises 100 hours of content, then that means that I can enjoy it for weeks or months. And each replay promises another 100 hours of content. I can play Skyrim or Fallout again and make some slightly different choices and it feels like a different game – kind of – and all without needing to buy something new.

I want to set aside the question of the underlying quality of those 100 hours. Is every quest and action the player can take and dialogue tree that can be explored that goes into that promise really “worth it”? As interesting as that question is, we’re not directly concerned with that here.

Instead, the focus is on how for many gamers who grew up with the constraint of money, it is now loosened. It still exists, but for many gamers it no longer poses the same problem as when we were kids. But now time weighs down upon us ever more powerfully.

It is that realization about how little time I have that has made me realize that I need to be more aware of how I spend it when it comes to games. While I still believe that there is value in playing “bad” games as a learning experience, there is only so much that I can realistically learn from a given experience.

And so in turn I become aware that a lot of my old habits – the desire to complete a game, to reach 100%, to get every achievement – need to be examined and discarded. That I need to stop myself and ask if continuing a game is worth it. Sure, I may be two or three hours in and thus be out 20 bucks…but is it really a good idea to waste my time just so I can say I got my money’s worth?

I bring all of this up because when we talk about a game’s value, we often focus on money. When time comes up, it is as a factor of length relative to money spent. A $60 game that lasts only a few hours might feel like a rip off because it is “too short.” Quality is rarely brought up in these contexts, in part because that question is so incredibly subjective. Indeed, it is more than just subjective, it is something that is difficult for us to describe to ourselves. You may enjoy one game more than another, but can you quantify that difference in a way that can allow you to effectively compare them for the purpose of value? Can you describe that difference in a way that you can describe some kind of exchange between those games – 3 hours of this game is worth 1 hour of this other game? Even if that exchange seems absurd, it is what lurks underneath the very concept of “value” in these discussions. And it explains why quality is so commonly absent.

At best, we might see the general statement said that someone might prefer a high-quality experience that lasts a brief time to a poor experience that drags on forever. But that statement ends up saying very little precisely because it gives us nothing to really latch on to. Probably everyone would agree with that sentiment, but media does not come packaged in this way. The Steam page for a game will not tell you that it is a high-quality or poor experience (the reviews perhaps giving you some potential indication, but not a clear and accurate answer). A game’s box will not tell you whether or not you are going to be wasting your time.

In essence, we have to take a risk when we start to consume any piece of media. And in taking that risk, we run another risk of falling into the sunk cost fallacy – the idea that if we have already invested something, we may as well continue investing so that the initial investment is not “wasted.” Sure, I’m not having fun after putting 5 hours into this game…but if I stop now, those five hours and whatever money I spent were wasted, so I may as well keep pouring time into it and get to the end of the game.

To a degree, many multiplayer games are designed to feed into this very idea – to push players to keep pouring time and money, spending one to justify the other. A new season comes out, and since you’ve been playing for 200 hours you may as well pay for that next season so you can keep up with what’s going on. And then you put in the time each day or week, and by the time you’ve finished it’s time for the next season to come out, and the cycle repeats.

I don’t want to suggest that every person playing multiplayer games of any kind are caught in a sunk cost fallacy, or that these games are not fun. Rather, that the way in which we normally approach questions of value don’t allow us to stop and ask these kinds of questions. Are we really enjoying ourselves, or are we essentially going through the motions because we feel like we have to?

In participating in and watching others do challenge runs of various games, I find myself posing a similar question. To what extent are we doing this because we want to, versus doing it because we think we have to squeeze everything out of the game, versus thinking we have to so we can prove ourselves? Any goal can be tainted in this way without our really realizing it, and push us to waste time and become frustrated.

Concluding Remarks

This essay wound up being much more rambling than I had originally intended. But I think that rambling nature better captures the complexity of the situation.

So much of what goes on inside of our heads is a black box. We generally aren’t entirely sure of what we really think and feel at first glance. And so the ways in which we approach fun and entertainment are as subject to warping and pressure as anything else in our lives. What we call “fun” can be a product of something entirely outside of our control, and upon further reflection might wind up being something that we actually hate.

At the end of the day, this is not some massive problem within the culture of media consumption. Most of the time most of us play games or watch movies or read books that we do genuinely enjoy. This is not a problem that requires us to rethink our entire beings from the ground up.

Rather, it is simply useful to stop and ask a single question now and then. When we get frustrated, to just pause and reflect on something:

“Am I really having fun?”

Because if the answer is “no,” and we keep going anyway, what does that ultimately say about us?