It’s not that I’m becoming a multiplayer gamer, so much as that I’m a gamer who is increasingly tired of the inside of her own head and finding it harder to escape it. Games are more of a distraction than a movie or book, but not quite stimulating enough to grab my attention away from my personal river of existential horror. Metagaming is a surprisingly good solution! It’s fun to plan out goals, to talk about how I want gaming to make me feel in a given game session, to set new additional challenges and imagine the ways a game might be used to modulate a mood or provide some fun.
I’ve said three things recently and then realized each was entirely true: I don’t really want to be the main character in a game, I just want to let the game (or the other characters or ideally other people I’m playing with) control the decision-making, and I really need constant dopamine (or serotonin!) hits from playing. That means I can’t remove the challenge from the game for myself (but I should minimize the frustration) because if there’s nothing to complete, there’s no reward, and I want my rewards frequently or I’m gonna get bored. And I should find company that is willing to create mini-goals for us or is really on board with the idea that I’m just gonna tag along carrying stuff because the idea of exerting my will on the universe is generally distasteful and exhausting at the best of times but just impossible now. I’ll pick if I have to, but mostly I just want to follow around like a puppy, thanks!
I really do (and I’ll keep saying it until people get interested enough to indulge me, a team of three is ideal) want to finish out Lord of the Rings Online because thinking about it, this hit all three. You’re important and helping a lot of people, but you’re not the savior of Middle Earth, just one person doing their best among many, it’s perfection. You’re on a general story arc and although you can stop and dive into any area you like and you’ll find days of entertainment anywhere that catches your fancy, you can also just let it guide you around. And it’s absolutely the best for rewards and incremental accomplishment, ever… you’re collecting cute clothes, you can craft dyes, you can decorate your house, you can hunt for particular pets, you can cook and feed all the other players, you can dig into lots of really interesting side stories, you can relive historical events, you can run around grinding the in-game currency by finishing deep dives into the various historically-important locations or learning a lot about particular groups of people, it’s basically like a constant comfortable drip of enjoying yourself, and even if you don’t want to do any of that at all, it can still be fun to just wander over to a particularly pretty spot and fish, or just watch the sunset. (This is a game that should have come out today, and it should have been VR!)
I used to play a whole lot of single-player RPGs because it gave me an excuse to get away from people and it made me feel like I had some sort of control over events during times when I had none. Now, I basically want the opposite of those things. No wonder I keep picking up a controller, playing for ten minutes and then wandering off! I’m a different person now, and what I want more than anything else is to feel like things are stable and consistent and manageable and comfortable. That’s not exactly a “stop the bad guy from destroying the world” game. But it’s not really a cozy game, either. Nothing bad can happen in some of those worlds. You’re not going to go hungry in Stardew Valley, or anger someone so badly that they’ll never speak to you again. You’re not going to cry over the cute little puzzle game because it moved you emotionally. Something in between is nice. A situation to resolve or come to terms with. Strength from those around you. Good things that without tending WILL go bad. A struggle that means something.
You can get a lot out of a game. But you do occasionally need to switch it up.