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IJAM and IJBM: some games are not very effective for short-term procrastination
This kinda annoys me because I end up spending a lot of my time playing relatively pointless games. Because it's typically the more pointless games that are easier to use for short-term procrastination. We're talking solitaire and minesweeper. There was a marked improvement in "meaningfulness" (though that's really not saying much) when I switched to Spelunky. Then I unlocked all the doors, and became a millionaire. (In-game. Real life? I wish.) I switched to Team Fortress 2, for which the only real results are "gain random items and hats to offer to trade to others or gift to others as a sign of goodwill" and "gradually learn to play the game better", the latter of which really doesn't happen anyway. Most recently, I switched to Terraria, which probably has the highest amount of "meaningfulness", as measured in lasting results and/or sense of satisfaction.
But it's just pretty much impossible to play some games for very short periods of time. Take Fire Emblem, for example. If you have a day, yes, you can go figure out the optimal strategy for a particular chapter, execute it, and restart the chapter if stuff goes wrong, trying to tweak it along the way. It's rather hard to think about anything else while you're thinking about this, though. It's not the kind of thing that you can really just Alt+Tab over to when you're bored of writing a paper or something--if you're playing, you might as well just close your MS Word/OpenOffice Writer, because nothing's getting done.
On the other hand, this is good because it limits the number of different things I could do with my time, and makes it easier for me to run out or get tired of options to procrastinate.
Yes, I know I've complained about this before. In less detail.
Comments
No.
...yes...very yes...!
Arcade-style games tend to be the best for this. Especially music games as gameplay is inherently divided into discrete chunks of definite, already-known length (and usually only a couple minutes).
As for the actual topic of the post though, I guess... Yeah, I guess I can agree that it's a bit annoying that certain games are extremely time-consuming. Especially for me since I mostly like to play RPGs, which are very poorly suited to play in short chunks (even more so because all of them I'm actually interested in are console games, so I'd actually have to leave my computer to play them). Which basically means I don't end up playing many games when I have stuff I need to be doing, even if technically I should have time to.
Yeah, this is mostly why I love action platformers, fighters and beat-em ups. And shoot em ups.