New Year’s Resolutions are normally focused on lifestyle changes — losing weight, eliminating habits, etc — but I thought it might be useful to write some gaming resolutions. Here are some of the bad habits I want to eliminate during the coming year, and some positive habits and I want to get myself into.
1. Play More Same Screen Multiplayer Games With Friends
Despite eating half my body weight in meat, here’s what I did on New Year’s Eve: I loaded up Steam on my living room TV, hooked up a bunch of controllers, and spent hours playing the silliest multiplayer games I could find. Nidhogg, Mount Your Friends, Starwhal — I had the best fun I’ve had in years, despite the varying quality of these games. It’s strange, but I never really thought of my PC as a place where those sort of experiences could happen but, nowadays, it’s just about the only place where it can actually happen. There are so many games that allow for those kind of same screen japes, and I could do with more of that hilarity in my life.
2. Give Up On Games I Don’t Enjoy
Some games just aren’t for everybody. I’ve spent more time than I care to remember playing games that I wasn’t enjoying just because it was something I felt I had to ‘be across’. That kind of thing will suck the life out of you. Take Dragon Age: Inquisition for example: 12 hours in and it’s still not clicking with me. Did I really need to persist for so long with a game that just wasn’t connecting with me? Life is short and so is my window of opportunity for gaming. I want the time I spend with video games to feel rewarding, I don’t want to get caught up grinding, trying to convince myself I’m having fun just to be part of the conversation. That’s a weird reason to play video games. I’ve wasted too much time engaging in that kind of behaviour. It stops now!
3. Seek Out Strange Gaming Experiences
Every Monday morning I trake through Steam in an attempt to find out what new games are coming out. At least two or three times a month I stumble across something weird and think, ‘oh, I should check that out’. Then I just play Mario Kart 8 instead. There’s nothing wrong with Mario Kart 8, Mario Kart 8 is top-notch, but every once in a while I reckon I should actually follow through and buy a couple of those strange games on Steam that elicit my curiosity. Yep, I’m going to do that more this year. Definitely.
4. Devote Myself To A Game I Actually Love For A Sustained Amount Of Time
My favourite gaming experience of 2014 was deciding to actually sit down and dedicate myself to Dark Souls to the exclusion of all other games until I finished it. In a strange way it was completely liberating. I didn’t feel anxious about the games I wasn’t playing, I didn’t stress about not being up-to-date with the latest and greatest ‘thing’. I just played a video game that I loved for a month. I’m pretty keen to do that all over again. Most likely that game will be Bloodborne.
5. Get Into Board Games
This is a very personal one. I feel as though I know next-to-nothing about board games. I want to change that. I want to play more tabletop games.
And those games don’t need to necessarily be ‘hardcore’ games like Netrunner, I’m just as happy playing Balderdash or Say Anything. I think I just want to indulge a little more in the social aspect of sitting around a table with a group of friends and playing something. I’m hearing from a lot of people that Ticket To Ride is a good place to start, any other suggestions?
That’s my gaming resolutions for 2015 — what are yours? Let us know in the comments below.
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