You Can Just Stop Playing Games If You're Not Enjoying Them

Playing a game and it suddenly feeling like work is pretty close to being universal in games media. Admittedly, it feels entirely ubiquitous when you work because, well, it is work. However, even when playing games just for fun, a good game can suddenly turn sour after a few bad sections, and a game that everyone else loves can fail to leave an impact. What are we to do in those situations, though? Is it okay to just drop it and never think about it again? Yes... of course it is.

Time Is Fleeting

Alright, so this is a needlessly existential section, but here we are. Our time is incredibly limited. Not only are most of us mortal (I'm not going to say we all are, because you can't truly be sure until you die), but we also all have to grapple with everything else in the world vying for our time. Work, family, too much D&D, creative hobbies, working out, eating, cooking, sleeping, staring into the abyss, shaving, closing social media on your phone only to open it up on your PC for some reason: it's a lot, and it means that time spent playing games is innately limited.

I appreciate this all sounds a bit much when discussing dropping a game that's five hours long, or even fifty hours long - in the scheme of things - but good lord there's so much stuff to do. Even if all you do is swap out the time you would have spent suffering through whatever game you're playing out of a sheer sense of guilt or FOMO with another game, you're spending your very limited time better. The brief moments in between constant stresses and responsibilities should be spent enjoying yourself. You shouldn't be wasting it suffering needlessly.

And Options For All

There's so much else to do. If your backlog is anything like mine, it's a monument to Humble Bundles, Steam Sales, and games I'm "definitely going to get to at some point." That's without including the ones I've picked up just to have because I played them years ago and really like them. Who am I fooling, and is it anyone other than myself? Heck, I'm not even buying it, so what in the ADHD-fuelled retail therapy am I doing here? My point, outside of staying far away from the buy button most of the time, is that you likely own a huge number of other games you could be playing instead.

There's a non-zero chance that you end up dropping those as well, and that's also fine, but it's better to have tried and dropped than never to have tried at all. You've got stuff to do, so much good stuff too. Even just the wealth of free games you can dive into nowadays is enough to keep you playing new levels or encounters from now until the end of time itself.

You don't need to put yourself through it, and yeah, it sucks to have spent money on something and then end up not enjoying it. But you need to remember money is something far less limited than time, even if it doesn't always feel like that. Replay an old game you love instead, go for a walk with a friend, spend some time chatting with the void inside yourself until you can sort out a day to see some mates or something. Most importantly, stop playing games you're not actively enjoying. You don't deserve that.