First a quick update... ended up buying some more Steam games (Amazon had a 5 pack of games I have been wanting to play on sale... I couldn't pass it up.) So yeah, that list is a little longer now.
As for gaming, I didn't really get much in last night, just a match of League of Legends.
Now on to business. I figure I should start outlining my plans for getting through my Stack of Shame. So let's start with the rules.
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OK, so there really are no rules.
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| Except for mandatory funny blog images. |
Rules are restrictive and lame. This is gaming, gaming is supposed to be fun.
I will however give an explanation to a term I have used before, since it really is the basis for all of this. That term is "sufficiently played".
"Sufficiently played" will be how I determine when a game goes from the stack back on the shelf. It is fairly self explanatory. I am not looking to finish every game, that would be unreasonable and diminish the idea of having fun. What I am looking to do is play every game for either a period of time in which I feel I got my moneys worth, complete some kind of goal I set for myself, or I come to the conclusion that I no longer enjoy playing said game.
Let's start with determining if I got my moneys worth. I will be using the theater ticket price divided by movie length calculation. We'll set the average ticket price at $10 (this is reasonable if not a little low) and the average movie at 2 hours. This gives you a pretty fair $5 per hour of entertainment.
I feel this translates to games pretty well. If you pay a full $60 for a game, you should be getting at least 12 hours of entertainment out of it (which is a reasonable length single player campaign) by this calculation. It also works well for games you get on the cheap. Anything that cost you less than $5, but you enjoy for an hour or more puts you ahead of paying to go out to a movie.
Sometimes instead of using the monetary factor, I will be setting goals for myself. Examples of these goals might be reaching a certain level in an MMO, beating the arcade mode with every character in a fighting game, or winning a certain number of matches in a FPS. Setting goals will mostly be used for games that I want to keep motivating myself to stick with past the point of getting my moneys worth.
The last resort is just giving up on a game. Typically I don't buy bad games, but you never know, no matter how highly praised a game is, it just might not be my cup of tea. However, I will not let this be the easy way out. If I choose to give up on a game before getting to the break even point of monetary investment, then I have to make up these hours of entertainment on another game. For example, if I paid $10 for a game, play it for an hour, and decide I never want to play it again, I need to make up the other hour of entertainment by adding an extra hour onto a different game. Since I don't want to be in game hour debt hell, this will hopefully not be the case very often.
Wait a second... these sure as shit sound like rules.
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| "Help control the pet population. Have your pets spayed or neutered." |
-K
