As a person, it was a very good move for me when I was younger to identify the sort of games that I liked. Understanding not just what I liked but why I liked what I liked helped me understand more about game design and provided the foundation for understanding design decisions on a macro level, and I feel like it’s one of the things that set me on the course from being someone who just played video games to someone who could talk about them and think about them on a professional level.
It was probably the second-most valuable skill I could have developed, because the most valuable skill was ignoring it.
Let me be clear about what I am saying, lest anyone think I am being vague: I review games all the time that I do not think I am going to like. I engage in content in MMORPGs with full knowledge that I might find it annoying or not fun. I do all of this with an open mind, flinging myself once more into the breach, and often times I throw myself into something I think is going to be bad and then find out that it is. And I’m glad for it.
The thing about knowing what you like is that every single niche of video games has changed substantially since the earlier days. There was a time when someone could, meaningfully, play every single NES game that was released in a given year. It was not immediately practical to do so – the expense alone would make it something most people couldn’t do – but it was something that was doable in terms of the raw number of games released on the console.
You cannot do that today. In fact, I would go so far that you have to get into a very narrow niche before the number of games released in a given month outstrip your ability to meaningfully play them with reasonable completion. We’re not talking clearing all forms of content, we’re talking about just playing front to back to what the average person would consider completion. I don’t think I could do it on a monthly basis for every game that’s basically trying to be Stardew Valley, even.
This means that it is very, very easy to know what you like and then stop seeing other things. And that’s fine, as far as it goes, but it’s also bad.
One of the things that is easy to lose sight of when you more or less already know what you like is that you have a tendency to stop looking for anything different. This is important, because it’s just fundamentally important for people to be able to be satisfied with the things you actually have. You cannot build a functional long-term relationship if you’re constantly swinging for The Next Substantially Better Thing. But it can also lead to a degree of complacency.
As a game reviewer, there are some games I want to review because I want to play the game, but that isn’t 100% of the offers I get. Sometimes I have offers for games I don’t really want to review. But I still do them, and I do everything I can to give those games a fair shot. In fact, sometimes I find games that I had never heard of and look like they’re going to be mid-tier options that wind up smacking me upside the head and impressing me (Nightmare Reaper springs to mind). And part of that is because I do, in fact, know what I like… and can make choices to the counter of what I like.
My goal when playing Final Fantasy XIV is to have a broad idea of everything in the game. Not just the things I like, everything. Part of the reason I make it a priority to play and level every single job – even the ones I don’t really enjoy all that much – is so that I am at least speaking from a position of understanding.
For example, you might have picked up over the years that I’m generally not a huge fan of pet classes. You might assume, then, that I unlocked Beastmaslter and haven’t really worked on it since then. And maybe there’s a reality where that’s true, but that’s not how I play. No, I’ve been working hard on the job ever since it was added to the game, because I want to be able to talk about it intelligently rather than just looking at it and saying “well, that’s for someone who isn’t me.”
As it turns out? It’s pretty fun! Not my preferred way to play the game by any means, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a different approach to a different kind of content. I respect that and appreciate it.
We all have a tendency to be our own worst enemies when it comes to knowing what we like and not wanting anything that we don’t already enjoy. It makes sense. Our time is valuable and limited. After a hard day of working, you don’t necessarily want to sit down with a game you know you’re going to hate just to find out if maybe you hate it less than you expect to hate it. With apologies to Marie Kondo, this does not spark joy. Nor would I expect it to do so.
But there is a remarkably short road from a comfortable routine into a rut. At least for me, I don’t like the option where I know what I want so well that I find myself just continually indulging in all the things that I already know I like. Yeah, there’s going to be a degree of that no matter what, it is the nature of being a human being, but I can at least try to avoid becoming some sort of sclerotic behemoth only content to pace the same path of my enclosure and dismissing everything novel as not being as good as this or that diversion from my youth.
I don’t think there is any sort of scientific way to gauge what the right balance is. But I know it involves some degree of saying “well, this isn’t my usual thing, but let’s give it a shot.” It means knowing what you like and then trying out something you might not like anyway. It’s going with an attitude of “hey, I’ll try anything once.” Even if you don’t like it, you’ve learned something! Is that such a bad thing?
After all, if you only ever jump on the things you know you’re going to like, you’re never going to get surprised by something you wouldn’t have tried otherwise. Bring back PlayStation demo discs, but for Steam. It’ll make money, if you ignore the fact that those discs weren’t sold at retail and never made money.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
