Total Play Time: 5,874,315 hours

I was listening to 1up.com’s fantastic Retronauts podcast a few days ago, and they were taking a look at the history of the Street Fighter series. After spending a better part of an hour discussing the minute details about the changes between the various versions of each game, be it from the arcade to the home port, or from the originals to their updates (SF2 Hyper Fighting, SF3 Third Strike, etc), one of the guys finally spoke up and said something that really resonated with me. I’m completely paraphrasing in the loosest sense of the word here, but it was something along the lines of him not really devoting enough time to Street Fighter games to get into the extreme minutae of parries and cancels and isms, because he simply has too many other games he wants to play.

That’s always been my approach to gaming. Ultimately, I want to play as many different games as I possibly can with the relatively small amount of time I’m going to have in my lifespan to play video games. There’s simply too many games that I want to get to, ranging from the all-time must-play classics to the little throwaway diversions that I use to take a break between epics. I just can’t relate to people who pick one specific series or genre and devote all of their time and effort into learning it top to bottom, like the afforementioned fighting game fanatics, or the people who somehow find the time to play RPGs all the way through five times. And the gamers that I really can’t get inside the heads of are the MMORPGers who put literally hundreds of hours into doing little more than “leveling up” (and don’t you dare accuse me of trivialzing an MMO. You know damn well that’s all you are really doing a good chunk of the time). Not that I’m saying there’s anything wrong with different approaches to gaming. To each his own. I just can’t really fathom taking an approach to video games (or anything else for that matter) that limits the amount of new and different content you are getting exposed to. When I think back to some of the great games I’ve played and finished in the past year or so - BioShock, Resident Evil 4, Zelda: Ocarina of Time (yes, it was my first time finishing it, so sue me), God of War 2, Bully, GTA San Andreas, Portal – I find it very hard to believe that someone who spent the same amount of time playing one or two games as I spent on all of those combined got as fulfilling of an experience as I did.

Of course that last statement hinges entirely on personal opinion and preference, which I acknowldege 100%. But they certainly didn’t have the range of complete experiences that I had. I can’t see how spending that same amount of time killing rats for better armor (again, I don’t want to hear it) or fine-tuning your custom combos could be anywhere near as fulfilling as the seven completely different stories and universes and casts of characters I experienced, each with a defined beginning, middle, and end. So maybe I ultimately suck at fighting games because I don’t devote much time to them, and maybe I can’t engage in deep discussions about the intricate details of any series’ history or its stories or characters because I basically play every game once and I don’t go above and beyond to explore every corner and unlock every secret. But if the trade-off is that I play a lot more games in a given month, year, or lifetime than someone who is hardcore about a specific game or genre or franchise, then that is fine by me. There’s just too many games to experience and not enough time to experience them. You wouldn’t just read one book over and over or only watch the same handful of movies repeatedly, so why approach games that way?