My husband loves baseball, and I’ve grown to enjoy it as well. But my favorite way to watch a baseball game on the couch with my husband is with my Switch in hand, playing a game that will take simply one thousand years to finish.
I love a long, long game. I love a long game that I am unlikely to ever finish. I love starting up a game that will take sixty to a hundred hours and treating it like a project. Hell, I love starting up a game that’s super long knowing that I will never finish it. Sometimes, simply playing the game is the thing I want to do, idly moving my hands while I wait for Yoshinobu Yamamoto to get three outs so the Dodgers can hit again.
Short games have their pleasures, but completing something is often not as rewarding as working away at it. I always end up taking a break before the last chapter of a book, not wanting it to end. I do that for long video games, too, taking a long pause before the final boss.
Hades and Hades 2 were games that I took to like a knitting project. Those games can be completed quickly if finishing them is the only goal you have. But I got obsessed with completing as many runs as I could with different boons, challenging myself by avoiding boons I liked and trying ones that I usually passed over, unlocking all the various collectibles and finishing the side stories for all the characters. The Cook, Serve, Delicious series has a similar effect on me, where I feel drawn to the repetition that it offers me—and the truly enormous options in terms of creating menus and stacking bonuses.
But the best kind of really long game is a Japanese RPG. Those games offer you a simply endless expanse of time in which to explore them. Recently I started playing Xenoblade Chronicles, and there’s just something special about throwing on a game and letting the cut scenes, which are always too long, play out while I trim my nails or make a snack. A game being a movie that you play sometimes is a good thing; it gives me a chance to ambulate around my apartment. Even better is when a game expects you to grind levels. There is simply nothing like getting a little bit stoned and playing turn-based combat encounters for a couple of hours.
It’s about pleasing the part of my brain that gets excited by matching patterns, and which can stack blocks or organize categories or account for elemental resistances for hundreds of hours. There are very, very few things I can do for long periods of time that pleases that part of my brain—eventually they get too boring. But video games are explicitly designed to make these tasks luxurious and exciting. So why not let them ride for a hundred hours? Even if I never reach the end, I will be satisfied.
It’s Hater Week here on Aftermath. This week we’re letting the hate flow through us by examining what it means to be a hater (and… a lover?), venting about some of our biggest pet peeves in games and life, and giving others a space to do the same.
