I’m a separated dad with a demanding job and a fiancé. I only have the kids when I’m not working but I want to be fully available for them.

Recently, I’ve noticed that it would be difficult for me to play more than a story/ambiance game (next one is gonna be either Dead Space Remake or Aliens Dark Descent) and forever playable game (Gran Turismo 7 since its launch).

If I played more games with the time I have, I would forget the story or the controls. I haven’t tried but I’m pretty sure of it.

The problem with such a system is that I’m almost a aralyzed when I have to chose which story/ambiance game I’m gonna play.

So what’s your system and what are your time limitations?

  • Ark-5English
    4·
    3 days ago

    I often get game choice paralysis, so I have extensively categorized my game library to help with both decision making, but also time management. I use numbers to force my categories to sort in the order I want rather than alphabetically by category name.

    Also worth noting I only started doing this after I stopped playing an MMO and reclaimed whatever % of my life.

    First is my “currently playing” category. This contains roughly one game from each other category/genre.

    • A story driven RPG (Witcher 3 at the moment, the Metro series after)
    • A rhythm game (McOsu, an Osu mod)
    • An optimization/building game (Shapez 2 but maybe back to factorio soon)
    • An action rougelike (going back to Hades before Hades 2)
    • A deck builder (currently MTGA, but my group really wants to ditch WotC)
    • A puzzle game (probably Blue Prince once it comes out)
    • A dedicated indie game spot (the Cairn demo)
    • A few other odd games that I like having quick access to because I like them

    There is sort of a secret bonus game to this section, but it also sits outside of this system entirely, because I will ALWAYS go back to it. And that’s the “block game” category. For a long time this was various flavors of modded Minecraft, but I’m so fed up with Microsoft enshitifying my baby that I’ve jumped ship. I’m playing Vintage Story (also heavily modded) and it’s just a better game top to bottom in my opinion.

    Then there is an “Interesred” category for games I’ve either been told I should try and also think I might enjoy. I try to keep this small, following roughly a similar “one per genre” as the previous category. I honestly don’t really touch these much, it’s more there for when a spot is freed up in the “currently playing” section. This is also where demos for unreleased games go.

    Then there is a “favorite” and “liked” category which largely contain games I’ve played before or are intentionally hyper replayable. This has a lot of my favorite puzzle games, a lot of the various rogue likes with a different game as the core mechanic (think peglin and ballionaire) stuff like that. Basically things to sift through if none of my current games are sparking an interest.

    After this is just genre categories used for storage essentially so I can collapse them and not be sick scrolling the whole list.

    I have a decent amount of time to game, but also work a very physical job, so I need to be very into a game to prioritize it over sleeping and such.