Well, I'm surprised it took this long, but it has finally gotten to the point where I subconsciously acknowledge that playing games for a class is technically "work", and it has thus become more exhausting than pleasurable. I knew this would happen eventually, but I was hoping it would take its sweet old time.
I must confess, come the end of the academic year I always become rather apathetic, and this year I have a nasty case of senioritis to boot. What really drove it home though was how aware I needed to be while playing games in order to make sure I met certain requirements for this class. I love playing video games, but when I start keeping an eye on the in-game clock, or when I'm opening my Achievements window every hour or so to see if I accomplished anything, it becomes tiresome. What was once enjoyable transforms into something tedious.
As much as I love keeping track of my progress, as feedback is pretty much the only thing that lets me move through a task without losing my sanity, being obsessive about it is almost as frustrating as not having any feedback at all. While playing FFVIII, every time I saved, I looked at the clock. If the time was about 2 hours since my last screenshot, I took a new screenshot, and then quit for the night. If it wasn't, I would continue playing. The second I hit 20 hours, I considered myself done. I didn't plan to do the Gee sidequests, and finishing the game only would have net me 50xp, so anything past the initial 20 hours would have just been eating up my free time (the closest I have ever gotten to beating that game put me past 60 hours; I did not have that kind of time or energy this semester).
I think the biggest problem was simply how I play video games. I tend to float between two extremes: play for a half hour or so, doing little things, and not caring about how much I've accomplished, or playing for several hours and not caring how long I've been staring at a screen (and also not caring about how much I've accomplished). With this class, I needed to learn how to budget my playing time, which is not something I've ever really done before. Gaming has always been that thing I do between working, but now I was treating it like work. Furthermore, I needed to start examining the progress I was making, instead of just enjoying the experience, which is also something I dislike about "work" in general.
This class was designed for those who don't play video games and don't read comic books. The goal of the class was to teach students to think critically about media that they normally would disregard. My problem was that I walked in considering video games and comic books as art and literature; I was able to use the comic book part of the class as time to geek out about philosophy/politics/social issues in comic books, but I wasn't quite able to do that with the video game part, as that was more geared towards teaching students unfamiliar with games how to play them, how to work together, and how to use games as a social platform. Being a gamer (albeit not an avid one, but one with a history nonetheless), I was already fairly experienced in this regard, and spent most of my time patiently waiting for the other students to catch up.
Don't get me wrong, class discussions managed to maintain my interest, but the discussions revolved around the required reading, such as Reality is Broken or Synthetic Worlds, not so much the games we were playing. The personal obsession with meeting meager in-game goals mixed with the lack of time to laugh about how hilariously overpowered I was in the games I was playing made gaming feel like not just a waste of time, but an unnecessarily exhausting one at that, with few real rewards.
I may not be an English major, but I do enjoy writing and thinking about various things I enjoy, such as comics and video games. I feel like I would have continued to enjoy the games I was playing if instead of focusing on the time I was playing or the Achievements I've accomplished, I could instead play to my heart's content, not caring about how long I've played or what I've actually done, and just chronicle my experiences after the fact.
Bah, forget it. What I'm trying to say I guess is that I hate being forced to do something that I would otherwise enjoy doing. I have the same thing with reading books. If I want to read a book, I can burn through it no problem, but if I MUST read a book, for a class, and have to take notes or write a paper or whatever, I cease to enjoy reading, because now I can't focus on the book, as I'm constantly thinking about what I will be doing with the material.
Just like reading though, I doubt this will actually stop me from enjoying gaming, once I'm no longer forced to do it. The second I'm done with this semester, I expect to go on a several-day Spiral Knights/Crash Bandicoot binge.
