Blogs How parenthood has altered my view of gaming

I'd agree that I became less tolerant of games with samey, repetitive tasks - The Witcher 2 and Far Cry 3 were little more than hippy simulators up to a point -wandering around the woodland, looking for plants and flowers - collect three of these, two of these and five of those, rub em together and make a satchel for carrying more stuff to rub together.

Belated congrats on the arrival of your noob, Rick.

 

Intense driving sims and multiplayer FPS is the way forward for the time-constrained gamer.

No stretched-out wishy-washy grandiosity, just pure concentration.

An hour on either and you need a break (or at least I do, but I am old).

 

We all go through this once we get to a certain age/point in life. It was only a few years ago I could come home from work, get straight on the PC and either shut the world out with an RPG or find a mate on Steam for a game of Battlefield/L4D/Whatever... till I could be bothered to make a sandwich/order Domino's.

Now I have to come home and make sure there's stuff in for dinner, double check if the wife has made plans for us to go out (or have friends over...), put the previous nights clothes wash away, make sure the rubbish is out if it's a bin day, go through the bank accounts to make sure all the bills are paid/can be paid, help the grandmother with her printer (again), do the washing up after dinner, reply to work emails, sort lunch out for the following day and shower/bath myself... And try and get 6-7 hours sleep.

I just don't have the time any more to properly lose myself in the game when it's not the weekend anymore, and neither do any of my friends - As Rich says, to get 3-4 people on at the same time requires weeks of planning and re-structuring of schedules - it's ridiculous!

 

As a family man who likes multiplayer games, I now really appreciate games that I can play in 20 minutes and then go (e.g. Wot, Overwatch, CS:Go etc). Any game that requires me to commit to 1 hour+ is just not going to happen very often.

That said I do find slots to play 1h+, but any game that needs to played longer for I also appreciate if I can do it in my own time scales - games that don't *need* me to commit a lot of hours a week to be competitive (e.g. I quickly gave up on Rust when most servers reset every few weeks and in that time you've got to go from stick to rocket launcher by grinding).

Oh, and kids eventually move on from nappies to fully capable gaming partners The challenge is then is keeping up. At least you can spout lots of "when I were a lad games were hard, we had 500ms of lag and we were glad!"

 

Not a Parent, but certainly after getting married, getting a dog and moving into a senior position has effected my gaming time. Though my compensation has been to sleep less. Im averaging 5 hours or less at the moment!

 

Yeah Dave, why do it on the PC when you spend half your day in your local woods rubbing away anyway.

Agree on the 'save & quit', that should be in every game, even if it's not a wee bairn that needs attending to. Handy for when the other half requires your attention immediately and any delay will cause thundestorms to form.

 

Well put and agreed.

 

You said you wouldn't tell!

 

Agree with others on 'Save and Quit'. Games that are checkpoint only (sadly common due to console games) are a royal pain too. To be honest, it's the only bit of the Final Fantasy games I wish they'd change; save points. Five at once, then nothing for ages and ages.

 

Disagree thoroughly. If you don't play every minute on multiplayer you get your ass handed to you. Plus I'm old enough that I'm tired of people after a day at work and with the kids. I don't want multiplayer, I just want a nice single player experience I can take at my own pace in small snippets.

 

Same. The other thing that I have found is that games that can be paused are a godsend when you have kids and as such I've not played any multiplayer games since my daughter was born at all. That and games where you can dip in for 20 or 30 minutes are also great. With multiplayer if you tried that you might spend half that time sat in lobbies waiting for matches to start...

 

This parenthood stuff seems awful, especially if it means less time gaming, i guess telling a new born to change its own nappies, cook its own dinner, and if they want booze and fags they'll have to go to the shop themselves is frowned upon these days.

 

This. So much.

I don't miss multiplayer at all - too much of the experience is marred by bickering tw@ts and adolescent asshats. Unfortunately, the big titles gravitated towards the bickering asshats, at the expense of the single player experience. Conflict breeds profit.

Not all bad though - this led me to discover some quality smaller indie games that have far out-stripped the amount of time I spent on any of the AAA titles.

 

Modern Consoles are more convenient for parenthood, they keep themselves updated, and you can power down and resume at any time, in any game whether it has save/quit or not they are also Quick to jump into when you have a small window, my PC gaming reduced loads since.

 

This is my default assumption when someone says 'internet multiplayer'. And when someone says 'local multiplayer' I'm sad because I no longer 18 playing Goldeneye.

 

* Must resist urge to say it's calmed down since you left the multiplayer interweb *

Agree though, other people are the only real negative of online gaming be they foul mouthed kids (beit age or mentality) or hackers.

I do delve in now and then, GTAV was my last and before that BF3 so it really is sporadic as it does need you to know you have a good whack of uninterrupted time available. Once i've stopped with one MP title that's me done though, not been in MP for about a year.

 

Tangent - Is there a higher res version of that first image?

 

I tend not to communicate much, or take much notice of ingame chat, during multiplayer. For example, in BF4, I'll only say something if my patch is being overrun, or to type "GG" at the end of a round. That's about it.

I do miss playing in a team though, where you can make proper use of good comms and everything's a lot less random.

I manage ok on a handful of hours a week, sometimes less. I don't spread those few hours between many games though. Usually just one or two. For the last few years it's been mainly BF (3 and then moved to 4). With regards to people, I just view them as I would any AI team-mate or enemy, just (usually) considerably smarter and therefore less annoying and more satisfying to play with/against, win or lose.

I suppose I treat it a bit like I would treat a game like chess. Familiar board, familiar pieces, but the game's so complex and challenging that there's always something that keeps me going back.