Last night was the eve of 2016, and I am now just days away from the eve of my 33rd birthday. The past year proved momentous in many respects. I successfully defended my prospectus in May and began work on my dissertation, all the while growing in my second year of a strong relationship and maintaining a healthy social life beyond that. Consequently, I’ve had to adapt a different approach to gaming for last year and likely many years to come.

I am part of a generation of gamers aging from carefree days of all-nighters into more and more responsibilities with each passing year. While in youth we could muster boundless energy to accomplish what few responsibilities we had on little sleep and still relish such a time-intensive hobby, that is a distant memory for many of us. I know of many forced to adapt even more abruptly than myself. My progression from MA program through my PhD program called for quite a bit of reevaluation over the years, but was likely insignificant compared to having a child or working multiple jobs. Still, some of the struggles might be similar in type, if not degree.

The greatest impact I have noticed is that time seems to function differently now. I have less of it, of course, to devote to such pursuits, but perhaps more impactful is how play has been divided into smaller blocks at a time. Often I will have only two or three hours when I make time to play a game. For the most part, I think I would scarcely have the energy for longer play anymore even if I didn’t have other responsibilities and relationships. To compound this issue, I find those blocks of time sometimes spaced out with days or even a whole week in between. Ten years ago, hardly a day would pass for me without playing whatever game was on my mind that month. Now I regularly pass two or three days, sometimes more. As a consequence, it takes me longer to work myself back into whatever game I am playing, as the mapping of controls, narrative, gameplay goals, and character is no longer fresh on my mind. Of those two to three hours of play I find, up to an hour might be re-familiarizing myself with the game. This is perhaps the greatest challenge to aging gamers: not simply less time to play, but picking up a mentally taxing activity that is further removed from memory.

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As this generation ages, many of the games we like to play have not exactly been rushing to accommodate the requirements of our new lifestyles. As a long-time fan of role-playing games and adventure games, I’ve found it to be quite the opposite. RPGs seem longer and more involved now than ever before, and filled with numerous side features to tempt us in every direction, such as collectibles in The Witcher III or settlements in Fallout 4. Micromanagement in these games has always been a time-intensive task beyond the actual play itself, but this condition seems even worse with the latest games. For many of us now dealing with such management in our daily lives (from finances to scheduling to home upkeep) this may seem an unwelcome intrusion of harsh reality into what was once our fantasy life. These features can drain what little time we have in our play sessions. Some games, most notably a number of independent games and/or episodic games such as Life is Strange or The Walking Dead, offer gaming in smaller and more focused packages to deliver a full experience in those isolated pockets of time. For those of us still drawn to the larger games, however, to the grand sweeping worlds, some adaptation is necessary.

My own adaptation has grown out of what was at first another negative shift in my gaming life this past year. The focus for much of my research deals with the build-up of affect, emotion, value associations, etc. over time throughout major single-player RPGs. As such, I soon realized that if I am to thoroughly analyze these games I will have no time left for games I will not be writing about. Other games I may wish to play for pleasure are largely pushed aside. Furthermore, research colonizes the games I do make time to play. Gaming is half work and half hobby to me now. The shift from playing for pure enjoyment to playing for research data was a difficult one. At first, I tried to take outline notes and sometimes to even categorize and analyze while playing. This led to a most unsatisfying gaming life. Towards the end of the year, I shifted towards trying to capture the experience of a particular play session and hope later to analyze it. Not only do I feel this may create better data, creating much closer connections to my memory of the experience, but I also feel it mitigates some of the challenges discussed above. Writing has always, to me, solidified memory. Even without consulting what I’ve written, the act of writing leads to better recall on the subject later. Now, those gaps between play times do not seem quite so long, I pick things back up more quickly than before, and the joy and magic of the gaming experience returns.

As I look towards the new year, I know many challenges lie ahead. Like most of my peers I must continue to adapt and maintain a balance between work, play, and relationships. It is easy to wax nostalgic for the carefree days of the past, but the pressure to find this balance is what makes us better human beings–full in our experiences, our loves, our joy, and our ability to meet the challenges we find in this world. I wish everyone a full life in this new year! Maybe some of you will find time to play with the unbridled joy of childhood, if only for a couple of weeks. But remember, it’s how you find the balance the rest of the year that counts.