Life is hard enough, please let the games be fun.

The only hard mode I'm playing is reality

Time-to-fun (T2F) has become a primary factor for me in discerning how much time I’m willing to put into a game.

Call it being an adult, a depressed millennial, or having an abundance of choice, but for me, the threshold is low.

I use video games to escape how horrible life is, I’ve not had the most charming of lives, and so my brain doesn’t have an abundance of fucks to give when it comes to my relaxation time.

I’ve found myself drawn to games with an easy learning curve, games that are easy to pick up and put down, games that already sit within my wheel house of skills, and most importantly games that are fun a soon as possible.

Fun is subjective obviously, to a certain extent, some people find throwing themselves at the same boss over and over again for hours at a time fun, or micro managing every detail of a complex system fun.

But those aren’t for me, I don’t even find surviving life that rewarding, and my entire career has been in managing systems and humans, I don’t want t come home and do that again.

And that’s fine, we are all different, and the video game economy caters to a variety of tastes.

However, i’m finding that less and less games are meeting my threshold, it could be that i’m the problem, and I’m happy to admit that, but it doesn’t help the feeling that i’m being left behind, or that I’m being pushed into a corner I don’t want to be in.

It should come as no surprise that I’m no fan of Souls-like combat, my anxious brain spends all day noticing ever little micro behavior of my peers and friends, I don’t want to come home and memorize how a boss moves, only to hammer the dodge button a million times and due to being a microsecond too slow, loose it all and be sent back to checkpoint.

It’s becoming more and more mainstream though, in both AAA and indie spaces. As a Star Wars fan it was a bit of a disappointment (though us SW fans are used to disappointment) to find that the Jedi: Fallen Order game was leaning into the dodge & parry style of combat.

I don’t particularly find that fun, life is filled with dodging people and uncomfortable conversations, and sadly I can’t use a lightsaber on them.

The games does have difficulty settings to allow me to make it easier, but its still the same game mechanic, just with a wider success window.

I much preferred the Force Unleashed games that basically made you a god and you didn’t really need to think that hard about what you were doing, for me that was a quicker T2F.

Same with the rise of survival games, it’s a genre I dabble in, I used to pour thousands of hours into Minecraft because I found it relaxing, and for the same reasons, I love No Mans Sky.

But some people really want to a game to punish them like life would if we devolved into a post-apocalyptic hellscape.

Maybe they see it as practice, or a different perspective, but I’m not particularly interested in cos-playing as a medieval peasant during the black-plague in my free time.

I want a game to be a fun escape, not a painful reminder about how much worse life could be.

For that, it’s starting to feel like i’m being boxed in. Forced to only engage with games that fall into the genre of ‘cozy’, but to be quite blunt, that can be a bit boring.

Remember I’m here for time-to-fun, not time-to-first-yeild on a farm some random relative left me in a town that seems to exist in it’s own micro-universe.

I’m not looking for cozy, i’m looking for fun. I’ve poured thousands of hours into Destiny 2 because it’s an easy space run and gun type game with fancy powers.

I’ve put over a hundred hours into Vampire Survivors because it’s fun to get to the point where you are murdering hundred of enemies a second.

I also find exploration fun, I’ve played countless indie games that nail a sense of exploration in a unique setting, and of course I’ve done my time in the great open worlds of GTA, Cyberpunk, Witcher, Starfield, Fallout, and Red Dead Redemption 2.

I like those games because the balance of difficulty and exploration is perfect, I couldn’t get into Horizon Zero Dawn because I felt like at every moment I was fighting for my life in the open world to the point I just couldn’t enjoy it.

It’s no ones fault, and I’m certainly not saying that because games aren’t meant for me specifically that games are bad, I’m just aware of what my T2F threshold is, and I think its something everyone should be aware of.

It certainly doesn’t help that games, especially in the AAA space have to evolve, and evolution often means more granularity of mechanics, and that often results in more cognitive load.

Whilst before a combat game was shoot enemy, its now shoot enemy with a specific gun, from a certain angle, during the .3ms they are open. Because that was the only way in which to evolve.

It’s got me nostalgic for an older time of games before things got more complex.

Used to love those silly Burnout games, Star Wars Battlefront, Spyro, Tribes, and Age of Empires, because the T2F was very fast.

In more modern times, I’ve been loving those games with lots of whimsy, Untitled Goose Game, Thank Goodness You’re Here, and Donut County.

A contributing factor is definitely the fact that Thea AAA industry is in a bit of a crisis about games development, too many cooks in the kitchen trying to cram as many things into a game and need it be a massive success, often resulting in a very expensive bland product.

It also doesn’t help that indie development lends itself to certain kinds of games, due to how achievable it is. It’s much quicker to make an indie 2d platformer where you can focus your efforts on making it as punishing as Dark Souls, than it is to try and make the indie equivalent of Red Dead Redemption.

For me it gets me thinking about accessibility, while we are certainly seeing more accessibility options, they do seem to be at a surface level.

It’s more about how a developer takes what they wanted to make and retro-actively add options to make certain aspects of the game more accessible.

It’s not necessarily factoring in fun, it’s more ensuring that if parts of the game could stop you from progressing, a work around is factored in. I certainly take advantage of accessibility options to augment my experience but find that they rarely make the game as fun or more fun, than the default approach.

Games are supposed to be about fun, and maybe what I consider fun, is no longer the representative view point, and that’s fine, I do not expect the industry to change for me. I’m just hopeful that I don’t run out of games in the future, hopeful that a balance of mindless whimsical fun has a space in the modern game.