1000 hours

In 2025, that's how many of my hours I spent playing video games. That seems like a high number, and it kinda is. 11% of my time in the year was spent with video games, an average of 2-3 hours a day.
Of course, the number is likely overstated: many of those hours saw those games left idle while I went off to do something else, as I am wont to do.

There were days past where my habits would be to spend many more hours of my time in games: my evenings, weekends, and holidays in one experience or another.
It seems a pretty common thing that people latch onto a single game as a "main" - for me that was for a long time a certain MMO, in which I had several high playtime periods, two long hiatuses, and a final decision to quit on 19th February 2023. More on that later.

As I've become older (ugh) and wiser (uuuggghhh), I have found myself better understanding the position of people who rank the quality of a game based on how many hours they can squeeze out of it.
That's not to say I think they're right, but the reasons they feel that way aren't alien to me.
As we get older, our perception changes. Time seems to move faster, and we start to value more and more what we use it on. If that value is understood as how many hours one gets to play the game relative to how much of your paycheck you had to spend on it, then that makes sense in its own way.

This equation on its surface seems like a good, objective measure: How many hours of value can I get for the dollars I spend?

I think that's a bit twisted though.

"Value"

What does that word mean to us?
It's hard not to relate value with the objective numbers of how much it cost monetarily and the time we get to play the game for, but is that the way we should measure our lives?

None of us get to keep our money and possessions when we're gone. We're gonna die eventually, and most of us aren't going to build a great pyramid with our video game collection surrounding our sarcophagus. Whether you believe as I do that we'll end up somewhere better, measured by our deeds, or in oblivion, or reincarnation, or something else: your money and possessions stay behind.
Like it or not though, many of us place a higher stake into games that cost more money to buy, and we feel that we need to wring every drop of play we can out of them. In my view, that desire goes often at odds with that stake. Are those hours really well-spent? What portion of them are actually enriching, and at what point are things going the other way, and we should put the game down and acknowledge it is no longer worth it?

Over time, I've been trying to rewire my brain on this. Value is something that is far more nebulous and personal, made up of the types of things that make our brains light up rather than go on autopilot. No, the cost of games in my view is what you lost - and what you lose is both money and time.

What you gain is some form of enrichment, whether that be fun, learning, mental exercise, a deeper understanding of someone's plight, pain, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc,

Now I'd like to share some stories of my failures and successes in reaching the right mindset and making the decisions that properly prioritise the things I value most.

Poor decisions

One of my biggest regrets from 2025 was playing Mass Effect: Andromeda. I got it for a pittance on sale, and it took 100 of my gaming hours from me.

To understand why this was such a bad choice, you have to understand that I have a severe allergy related to games. It's rather serious, and it's this:

I cannot abide my time to be wasted, no matter how minor the infraction.

Mass Effect: Andromeda's infractions are not minor. There are lots of things that are well-done in this game, but I won't waste your time listing them because they're utterly irrelevant in the face of just how much of my time I spent doing things I gained nothing from.
Probably 50 of the hours I spent playing this game were watching loading screens. That's not a complaint about slow load times, mind. That's because this game constantly sends you on wild goose chases from one planet to another, doing mind-numbing objectives with no meaningful purpose.
Maybe 10 of them were engaging with the reasonably fun combat and exploration, with the remaining 40 scattered between awful dialogue and dull, non-committal politics that's too scared to ever call the protagonist wrong.

I could spend a lot longer complaining about this game, but I hope I was able to show the stink this experience left me with.

^{_{"But Will", you're asking yourself, "why did you see it through instead of just quitting and abandoning it?"
And to that I say: "look, don't ask me questions I don't have the answer to, all right?"}}

Of course, you're right. The cost of the game may have been €2 monetarily, but in truth, the cost was 100 hours, and the negative moods it left me with. Imagine what I could have done in 100 hours! That's 450km of hiking, or time to learn a language, or even better, time to play a bunch of wee indie games.

Another game I put a lot of time into, although thankfully it's a memory from a few years ago now, was Fallout 4. I clocked in at, oh dear

This taught me a lot about my habits. What I learned was not worth 300 hours of my limited human life, but I did find out that something about the intersection of mods and base building magically compels me to spend unreasonable amounts of my time testing, debugging, and building out nice places that nobody will ever see except for me.
I've since resisted the urge to go down the same rabbit hole, because it seems to lead to an unhealthy type of engagement. That's not to say it's wrong to engage with either of those things, it's just that it isn't right for me.

Better ones

I dropped Destiny 2 after serious reflection on the value it brought me. I came up for air, looked around, and I realised it was the community I was in, the way we used to engage with the game and one another-

What happened? Why aren't groups filling up? Why aren't the regulars setting up meme runs of raids?
This game set me up with some friendships I'll likely hold forever, and it wasn't its fault that I felt the need to stop. It turns out the value wasn't in the game, but in the people who moved on from it, bit by bit.

Honestly, I think it's reasonable to say that I experienced a kind of grief, that something that was a real part of my life was lost. But that mourning didn't last, because the real Destiny was the friends I made along the way.

A game that, on its own terms, affected me in a truly positive way was The Talos Principle 2. It is a beautiful celebration of thought, from its puzzles to its dialogue, and it was an experience that provided something beyond the more obvious objective of "having fun".
Great puzzles were of course to be expected, but I found myself almost more impressed by the characters and writing. There's an infectiously good vibe, of the sort that manages to make you feel chill but that doesn't get annoying.
That's probably because alongside that they're constantly inviting you to think about real, thoughtful questions, where the answers depend primarily on interrogating your own worldview - very tasty.
It feels almost like a perfect world's academia: solve cool problems, and discuss interesting topics with peers who challenge you in a pure pursuit of the common goal of understanding the universe and our place in it.

Endless creativity was on display with every location, with some of the best direction of photography of any game I think I've ever seen. It really is a masterpiece of design at all levels. Everything about it grabs your mind and makes you observe, think, and engage.

I have such a vivid recollection of it all. The time feels like it stretched, that it defined some part of me far more than it had any right to as a video game I played for just half the time I spent on (ugh) Mass Effect Andromeda.
If I really think about it, the impact of this game as far as time goes was more than even the 1500 hours of Destiny 2.

It's funny how time works like that.

In the moment, the hours slip away, but it's when you look back on it that you realise what takes up more space on the timeline in your memory.

All right I think you have a point you want to make, let's have it

We're in a time where media seems more and more focused on emptying our minds. It sounds almost conspiratorial, but I promise it isn't - it's just the natural progression of a culture where an algorithm feeds us the next thing in pursuit of keeping us playing or watching or reading. More content, easier to consume, emptier, give me more more more more-

Something's gotta give.

I just want to stop doomscrolling, man.

Life isn't long enough to switch off this way.

Give me a game that brings novelty; the kind that children experience with every moment.

The type that makes the time here on this planet feel a little bit longer, and makes me a little bit different.