Avoid The Void.

Dang, time really flies when you're not writing. Sheesh.

So last month I wrote about that all too familiar feeling of being in a funk. In fact, I've written about it quite often. To me it's a condition that comes about when you're A) a bad time manager and B) have too many game choices. This all leads to the indecisive funk where I want to play everything, I just can't decide what I want to play. It's all maddening really.

The List of Backlog was suppose to help alleviate that issue, but it really hasn't. Towards the end of April I got to a point in Space Hulk Ascension where I felt I had accomplished what I wanted with the game and I could confidently move on to something else. Problem is, nothing on The List was really grabbing me.

I kind of played this or that, messed around with some MMO's, nothing too serious. I even started replaying Borderlands 2, a game that I really enjoy. Then June hits and the 4th anniversary event for Marvel Heroes 2016 begins. And for a good two and a half weeks I played a ton of Marvel Heroes. To the tune of around 120 hours.

See, games like Marvel Heroes, Diablo 3, Battlefield, Paladins or any other online game are great for those times when you want to play something but can't decided which game you're going to sink time into. With a game like Diablo 3, at the start of every season I tend to play for about a month, leveling up multiple characters and grabbing loot. At the end of it I feel satisfied, I enjoyed myself and I don't feel like I was wasting time. Same with games like Battlefield and Paladins. I'll play them exclusively for a weekend or two to get my competitive juices flowing. And when I'm finished and I move onto something else, I know that I can go back to those games again and still enjoy them.

MMO's used to be that for me, they used to fill that void when game paralysis was beginning to take hold. I remember 10 years ago having a subscription to City of Heroes and the Sony Access which included Everquest 2, Star Wars Galaxies, Matrix Online and Vanguard. On my days off from work I would just play any one of those games, sometimes all of them. And that's what I did. Sometimes one game would have my interest most so I would spend more time in that one, but I was pretty good about playing them all to give myself some variety. Those were good times.

The downfall of all that really was digital distribution. As digital distribution became bigger, so did my collection of games. But that's a topic for another day really.