Every so often, I decide to watch something on Twitch. It’s usually Friends at the Table streaming something because, if I’m being honest, I don’t much care for watching one person play a video game. If it’s a group of people, or one person is playing but there’s multiple voices involved, I enjoy it more, but I still don’t generally enjoy watching people play games. Friends at the Table is different, though, because my entire familiarity with them is listening to them play games, so watching them play games feels like a lateral move. Another reason I tend to avoid it is because I’m a sucker for “this looks fun!” type enthusiasm. I will absolutely get suckered into buying a game because I saw someone else enjoying it and then wind up not liking it myself because a large part of the fun was watching the other person play it. If I avoid watching streams of people playing games, then I don’t have to contend with wanting to buy a bunch of indie or smaller-studio games that I will never play (like 90% of my Steam library) or that I just won’t enjoy for longer than I watched the person stream it. The rest of my reason for not watching much streamed stuff is that I generally enjoy playing a game more than watching someone else play it. There are exceptions to this, of course, but it’s still generally true. All of which is largely beside the point because I’ve been watching a little more streamed stuff lately than I usually do and I’ve been thinking about buying some new games to fill an incredibly specific and empty niche in my life right now.

I’ve avoided buying any new game so far since part of the driving force behind this thought is the fact that all of the games I’ve tried to go back to since playing Veilguard have just felt flat and uninteresting. A part of my mind is whispering that the best solution to this problem is to buy new games and play those, since they’ll definitely be fun and exciting in a way that none of my currently owned game could ever be. Despite, you know, the fact that I genuinely enjoyed Echoes of Wisdom for a while and that I still want to beat Dragon’s Dogma so I can play the unopened copy of Dragon’s Dogma 2 I bought and planned to play over the summer back before I discovered that there would be a New Dragon Age game this year. I also really want to get back to Armored Core VI, since I’m pretty sure I can play it in a more casual fashion that will avoid me falling asleep with the missile Locked-On noise ringing in my ears constantly. But no, none of those are good enough and I need to get some new games to play to fill the one niche that none of those games can: the mindless grindy game.

Previously, this specific niche was filled by games like Minecraft or Valheim, but attempting to play both of them recently has left me feeling dissatisfied and bored. I’m pretty sure I only feel that way about Minecraft because of my recent experiences with Veilguard, but I don’t know if I’m ever going to properly enjoy Valheim again now that I’m not longer talking to the person I used to play it with all the time. It’s a difficult game to enjoy when everything I do is a reminder of the tens to hundreds of hours I played this game with that guy and it’s also a difficult game to even play on your own. So much of it involved moving as a group or helping your fellow players out that it just isn’t the same playing alone. Which is kind of the same with Minecraft. Sure, I don’t mind as much if I’m playing alone in that game, but it still doesn’t feel as nice playing it alone as it felt playing it with other people. I don’t really know that I’ve got a gaming group I could pull together for something like that, these days. However, an entirely new game, like that TCG Shop Simulator game, where the entire thing is moderately repetitive tasks with a slowly increasing number of tasks to perform as the games scale gradually expands, sounds like exactly the sort of thing for me to pointlessly and endlessly invest myself in. Nothing quite like an orderly simulator to help assuage my need to feel like any part of my life is under my control these days… And nothing like playing a game focused around a facsimile of Pokémon trading cards to make it at least sort of pursuant to my interests! I remember what it was like, back in the day, when Pokémon cards weren’t the wildly valuable commodity they are now, and playing a game that simulates what it was like to run a game store that sold them seems like it would be fairly entertaining for at least a few hours. There’s nothing quite like watching a number go up as you minutely control every aspect of your virtual environment to make your anxious, obsessive brain unclench.

It might also be nice to find some kind of incredibly low-stakes multiple player games to play. Due to my lack of sleep, I stopped hosting a weekly Stardew Valley game with some people from a Discord server I’m in, so it will be nice to get that back up and running now that I’m finally getting more than six hours of sleep at a time and can think again. And I’ve been so focused on single player games that I’ve barely done anything with my usual online gaming friends. I’m not sure I’m ready to jump into Final Fantasy XIV as deeply as they have, but maybe I could convince them to do something lower stakes and maybe less stressful than Palia seems to be for one of them given that she stopped playing during the “everything is in storage” phase of a complete restructuring of her home. Or maybe I can make some new friends in that game by trying to hit up one of the people in another discord server I joined for the express purpose of playing together with said person after we bumped into each other on Bluesky. Joining that discord server had the unfortunate timing of happening IMMEDIATELY before I stopped playing anything but Dragon Age: Inquisition (so I could finish it on time), so we never got to play together, but maybe this person is still playing! It’s always fun to make new friends and it might be fun to do some multiplayer online stuff for a change. I mean, I’ve played Veilguard with my book club and we’ve been actively talking in our group chat about our experiences, but there’s nothing quite like playing the same game together with people. Maybe that’s what I need, more than some kind of escapism simulator game… I’m sure I’ll figure it out eventually. In the meantime, though, that second playthrough of Veilguard isn’t going to finish itself…