Those who frequent social media are bound to feel FOMO at some point. If everyone is raving about the newest game, you’ll be inclined to pick it up so you can be a part of the conversation. But another new game just came out last week, and there’s another coming a week from now. All three will leave you on the sidelines if you don’t scramble to play them, but games are growing bigger with each new release—two of the ones I just mentioned are 60-hour RPGs. It’s a horrible cycle that ends only one way—burnout. You’re gonna turn a hobby into a chore and lose all love for it.
Editor-in-Chief Stacey Henley put it best, “June is going to kill us, gamers”. But only if you let it. We had Final Fantasy 16, Street Fighter 6, and Diablo 4 in one month, two of which are 60-plus-hour RPGs, and that’s being generous. Trying to play all three in one month before we get Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield only a couple of months later is going to burn you out. But so many of us feel the need to because the urge to keep up has never been stronger, with social media and parasocial online relationships that have only been strengthened by the COVID-19 pandemic. But you don’t have to.
Gaming is a hobby, and there’s nothing wrong with taking it slow and sticking to the games you’re personally excited for, rather than the ones that excite everyone else. Obviously, I’m writing from the perspective of a games journalist, so it’s part of my job now to keep up with new releases, but even then, racing to play every single game is not feasible. They’re too big, and there are too many coming thick and fast, and it’s not like we get a year to breathe and catch up—the cycle continues into 2024. You either burn through everything new now or let these titles fall to the wayside and try to pick up the pieces in the still-busy months to come.
Or there’s the third option. The healthy option. One that doesn’t end in you scrolling through a library mindlessly at 9pm on a Friday night burnt out at the idea of playing anything because you’ve sucked the joy out of it—just play a game or two at your own pace without putting a time limit on yourself. There’s nothing worse than rushing a huge RPG when there’s so much to see and take your time with. I just did that with the three modern Assassin’s Creeds, and believe me, by the time I finished Valhalla, I was painfully numb. All to keep up with the story ahead of Mirage.
I have a lot of admiration for those that pick a game or two a year and play them to death. Whether it’s a huge RPG like Assassin’s Creed or the usual suspects like FIFA and Call of Duty. There must be something blissful about gaming being a fun thing you do in your spare time as opposed to a calendar checklist you obsessively keep up with. That’s what gaming feels like more and more, especially as publishers cram months full of huge titles and we latch onto YouTubers and internet personalities who post about every new release. It’s the new playground gossip; you want to know what everyone’s talking about and have something to add, like you’re talking to your friends, but we’re not on the playground. It’s the internet and we’re all strangers.
This obsession with keeping up leaves little room for anything else. There are so many old games to try that go on sale for dirt cheap or get added to newer consoles with backward compatibility. If you’re stuck playing nothing but new releases month in and month out, you won’t have time for them. Nothing has brought back my love for gaming like tapping into classics I’ve always wanted to finish, whether that’s Thief, Dishonored, Hexen, Blood, Ys, Starship Titanic, the original Baldur’s Gate, Alan Wake, Stalker… the list goes on. Shirking Final Fantasy 16, Dead Space Remake, and Diablo 4 left me room for these, and I couldn’t be happier that I went down that path instead.
The internet dilutes all these conversations until it’s just noise from thousands of accounts anyway, and the odds of standing out with much to say are slim, so don’t stress about staying in the loop. All you’re doing is throwing yourself onto a hamster wheel that’s spinning at 60 mph with 100 other hamsters trying not to get thrown off. It’s not going to get you anywhere, so take it easy. Gaming is meant to be fun, and an obsession with everything new is the antithesis of that.