WHY CAN'T I QUIT YOU?! - My Strained Relationship with Strategy Games

Roughly half the reason I got into this line of work is that I have an incessant need to stay up to date with video games. I try to play at least a bit of everything, I watch hours of videos about games I’ll never play and esports I’ll never actually understand. I buy all the consoles and fancy graphics cards instead of feeding my children. You know, gamer stuff. I enjoy it, knowledge is its own reward and all that, but there are drawbacks. For one, I end up with an inflated sense of how much I actually want to play certain games.

Every now and then I get a notion that I’ll get into World of Warcraft, or League of Legends. I even regularly download them, whether I’ll play them or not is another story. Something like Valorant comes along, fills my Twitter feed and I think I’ll get in on the ground level. That lasts maybe two days. I have started hundreds of games without finishing them. Unfortunately, there are only so many hours in a day and, despite what some gaming forums would have you believe, I have to do other things like work and sleep so my ultimate goal of playing every video game ever can never come true. 

I have become a jack of all video game trades, but I’ll never be a master of any.

There are two genres in particular that have broken my heart. The first is fighting games. I adore them, I enjoy watching them, I love playing them, I’d even make the claim that I’m not bad at them. I just don’t have the patience to stick with one long enough to ever get better than not bad at one.   I’ll play any single player content, learn a few combos, lose a few online matches and call it a day.

We are not travelling all the way to another Civilization for McDonalds, we have a perfectly nice Medieval Times right here!

Getting to the atomic era was all worth it for this Bruins/Maple Leafs game.

The other genre is strategy games, and my god I love strategy games for all the wrong reasons. I love to look at strategy games— miniatures have always appealed to me and when you give me a huge map of tiny cities and landscapes I am going to spend most of my time gawking at all the little details and forget to pay attention to anything else. If we’re talking RTS games like Warcraft or Age of Empires, I become an accidental turtle. Which is to say, I’ll spend forever building my little settlement and amassing a huge force. The second part is incidental by the way, I end up with a large army purely because I like making all the little buildings and arranging them in a pleasing way.

My strongest love/hate relationship is with, and it pains me to say it, Civilization. The video games, not the concept. I have only contempt for our actual civilization. Many of my friends have become big-time Civ players during the pandemic, and I really do enjoy playing with them. However, I’ve come to the realisation that I mostly just enjoy talking to my friends for seven hours at a time, and that’s about it. Honestly, I do try. I never know which civilization to pick because I don’t know who is good. Lately I’ve been picking Canada because I want to make hockey rinks and role play by politely chastising my friends for being rude. That is genuinely the closest I have ever come to a strategy, outside of that I just try to build cool things and hope for the best. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m having fun!.. I think.

Here’s the kicker, I spend untold hours watching people play specifically these kinds of games on Youtube. I follow multiple channels run by people much smarter than I am who play them “properly” for me. I have watched Mandalore’s Total War Warhammer 2 video too many times, in the hope of convincing myself I could play it too. The worst part is I buy into my own bullshit! I am currently 150 turns into a high elf campaign and I have zero clue what the hell is going on. I know there’s a big magic donut I have to protect from my emo cousins and some lizard people. But I spend so much time not really doing anything useful that now I couldn't tell you how to go about protecting said magic donut. I have over twenty hours on this game and I can’t even tell you if I’m winning.

THIS LOOKS SO COOL… But, er, could someone tell me what is going?

I wish I was good at strategy games. Like I said, I genuinely love them. There are lots of games I have a passing interest in, I’ll read up on them but I don’t feel any great need to play them. Strategy games are different, I can feel myself being drawn to them. My Steam library is STACKED with strategy games I’ve never played and likely never will. That’s bad enough, but as much as they’ve hurt my wallet they’ve hurt my feelings even more. I just wish they loved me as much as I love them. I just wish…..

I know there are lessons to be learned here. However, it takes me a lot of tries to actually learn them. One of the lessons I have learned is, I have a type. My type is big, loud, stupid video games. I like Devil May Cry, I like Resident Evil, I like Metal Gear. I like schlock. Does that make me a classless, uncultured gamer swine? Probably, but at least I’m not using spreadsheets and quadratic equations to play video games, nerd. I know I don’t have to stay in my lane but I really can’t act surprised when a strategy game comes along and just isn’t my thing.

Old strategy game? Account software? An air traffic control’s monitor? WHO KNOWS!

However, I think what I have slowly figured out is that it is okay to enjoy something the wrong way. I play strategy games completely wrong, I never succeed the way the game wants me to. I get distracted by nonsense, I make up my own stories, I just do it all wrong. Still, I have fun and literally what else matters? I might wish I could get these games but I think it's time I come to terms with my inability to be good at strategy games. 

It gets frustrating when I do actually try to play these games as intended and I fail utterly, so  I’ll just watch other people who have it all figured out! Watching others play such slow, methodical games is extremely relaxing to me. I guess I just need to accept that that’s fine? Feels ridiculous to say but yeah, it is!

If there is a broader life lesson to be gleaned here I suppose it’s this. Life is finite, and we can never experience it all. It’s a natural ambition to want to experience as much as possible, likely tied to some deeper psychological fear of the end, but that’s not a great reason to spend your life playing video games you don’t really love. Video games are awesome and a worthwhile endeavour, this isn’t some holier-than-thou speech where I tell you if you play games you need to go touch grass. My point is merely that recognising bad relationships and getting out of them is a really good thing to do. Life is too short to waste on someone who doesn’t love you, a friend or family member who isn’t there for you, or an overly complicated video game that isn’t compatible with my idiot brain.