How My Short Attention Span Ruins Gaming

I think I'm ready to confess: I get bored easily, and half the time, I'm struggling to sit still and get through things. This goes for everything from YouTube videos and shows to videogames and chores — I just want to go do the next thing!

I personally didn't like this about myself because I didn't like the idea of never watching a show through, seeing as one of her biggest pastimes is rewatching really good shows. I'm talking about amounts of watching that allows even me to say the lines alongside the actors in How I Met Your Mother. 

Now, I thought I'd finally gotten a grip on it because I sat through the entire Marvel journey and have watched a good handful of episodes from The 100. I was very proud, to be honest! And then my wife started noticing a pattern very reminiscent of me not being able to sit still in one place.

… Can you see it too?

30 hours. 30 hours is the amount of time I can play a game before I start struggling to turn it on. That is nowhere near enough to finish something as humongous as Skyrim, or Fallout 4, or, to my absolute dismay, Horizon Zero Dawn.

She had already mentioned I tend to leave games unfinished, but I honestly didn't believe her. I kept giving explanations and excuses about why; it was always, "I have never played this type of game before, it's not that I'm bored of the other one!".

It was all going well for me up until I had to play Horizon Zero Dawn. See, a good friend of my wife's gifted it to her and she was very excited for me to try it because it would be my very first open-world experience. I reluctantly (and I mean reluctantly) said yes to basically taking the game from her and began my journey with Aloy. 

I was having an absolute blast! I loved having the freedom to run around everywhere, I loved the fighting mechanics, I even loved Aloy so much! Just like a fresh relationship, everything was new and exciting. 

That is... until the 30 hours hit. And suddenly I was dragging my feet. The excuses started piling up again, but this time, I didn't have another game to jump to because I had been avoiding looking at any other game because I wanted to show her I could sit still.

So you know what I decided to start doing instead?

Reading. I actually went to read.

I'm not saying reading is bad at all. I'm saying that I consumed around three books and kept coming up with excuses until finally I just admitted my crime to my wife. I confessed my sins and I said she was right, as I so often find myself doing. And then I convinced her to please just take the freaking game and set me free. 

Now that I have finally admitted my obsession with game jumping and leaving everything behind, my wife has put some rules on the table for me. 

One of them is that in open-worlds like The Witcher where you have missions and towns, I am not allowed to go to the next new and exciting town until I have finished every quest in the last one. This is due to the fact that I started piling and piling up side quest on side quest and never actually finished anything because I'd get distracted running around killing things on my own. 

Another rule is that I'm not allowed to get obsessed with only one feature in the game, like in Skyrim, where I spent around 90% of the time just running around stealing and killing people. And when I say 90% I really do mean that I would spend actual hours upon hours hoarding stolen goods. 

And speaking about Bethesda games, anyone that might go to my library will see that I have over 100 hours on Fallout 4 and think that I am lying. Except for the fact that the game has 136 hours in it but, you know what it doesn't have?

The freaking achievement for finishing the game.

And it’s not just the fact that I can’t proudly say I’ve finished big open-world games like Skyrim and Fallout 4, it’s the fact that I am a huge fan of taking it slow and enjoying every aspect of the game. One example is in Zelda Twilight Princess, which is my wife’s favorite Zelda game. I really wanted to play it for her and experience why she loved it so much (this wasn’t my very first playthrough because I had played it thousands of years ago when I was a teen), I so jumped straight in. 

I love collecting the bugs in it and finishing the dungeons 100% by getting every heart. Speaking of hearts, I was also hunting down the heart pieces. Heck, life was good! There was so much to do, even in a Zelda game (yes offense, Nintendo)! I really had confidence I’d be able to finish it, but then I didn’t because I promised we’d go back to playing it as soon as we finished Kena: Bridge of Spirits... and then I also didn't finish that one. As I prepared to write this article, my wife told me “hey, check how many hours you have on Twilight Princess,” and so I did… and you won’t believe it. 

So now I am embarking, my friends, on a new journey to learn how to stick to a game through and through. Let's just hope that you have maybe gotten a glimpse as to how a short attention span can be a plague upon one's existence as a gamer and always remember the tale of the woman that never finished an