Games & Choice

Buying a Game Takes Minutes. Playing It Takes Part of My Life.

My game library does not have one or two thousand titles, but it has grown large enough that I can no longer pretend I will get through every one someday.

Some games were bought on sale. Some caught me through a trailer or description, and I genuinely wanted to play them at the time. Others came from the thought that if I did not buy them now, I might forget them later. Pressing the purchase button took only a few minutes. The interest was real.

The problem usually appeared after the purchase.

Actually opening a game asks for more than disk space. I need a stretch of time to sit down. I also need enough mental energy to remember the controls, recall where I left off, or accept that I may make only a little progress tonight. With a story-heavy game, a complicated system, or something I have not opened in months, simply returning to where I was takes effort.

Browsing the store asks for none of that.

I can watch trailers, read reviews, and add games to my wishlist even when I am tired. At that point, every new game still exists only in its most appealing form: a world I have never visited, a system that looks interesting, or a feeling I happen to want. It has not yet become the level that keeps me stuck for several evenings, or the question of where I will find forty hours before I can see the story end.

Buying a game and playing one are obviously different activities. Underneath, though, they can offer a similar reward: the anticipation of a new experience.

The pleasure of playing comes from entering the game itself. The pleasure of buying can arrive earlier, through imagination and the feeling that I now own my next experience. Research on anticipatory utility suggests that people can enjoy not only a reward itself but also the period of waiting for and anticipating it. A separate consumer study found that, for some consumers, a product may produce more positive emotion before purchase than after ownership.

That does not mean buying a game is necessarily more enjoyable than playing it. The difference is that a purchase takes minutes. It completes a choice and provides some satisfaction immediately. Playing still has to be paid for with a later evening or weekend, along with whatever attention and energy I have then.

Someone could say: just stop buying so many games.

That is not wrong. I can try to buy less impulsively. But it does not resolve the practical gap between buying a game and actually playing it. Digital games have become remarkably easy to acquire. In a few minutes, I can buy far more than I could play this month. The amount of time I have in a day does not increase when the discounts do.

Games are not the only things competing for a player’s attention. The same evening also contains fatigue left over from work, unanswered messages, social feeds, videos, chores, and the rest a person genuinely needs. A player is not merely dividing time among several games. They are deciding, within the rest of life, whether they still have enough energy to enter another world tonight.

It makes sense that this is usually left to the individual. Whether a game is good, worth the price, or truly owned is easier to discuss in public. Everyone’s time, mental energy, and physical capacity differ, so they naturally appear to be personal matters. But when every way of acquiring games becomes faster while the life available for playing them does not expand, the issue is no longer only whether one person manages time well.

Free giveaways work the same way. Spending no money does not mean adding no choice. One more title in the library may appear to cost nothing. When I eventually have to decide what to play, it still sits there with all the others.

I would not say I was deceived. I was interested in those games, and no platform ever said I would finish them all. But at the moment of purchase, I often make a casual assumption: there will be time later.

When I actually try to find that time, I remember that being interested in a game and opening it to play are not the same thing.

I will still buy new games. Of course it is exciting to see a world I have never visited, and I do not want to interrogate myself every time I reach checkout. But often I do not know which game I want to play. I am simply tired and want a change of mood, or I want the next few hours to contain something enjoyable. Trailers, reviews, and discounts can quickly make one game look like the answer. They can tell me which game I most want to buy without helping me understand what kind of play I actually want.

If collecting is what I enjoy, there is nothing wrong with that. But once I press purchase, the satisfaction of collecting has already arrived while play has not begun. The new game waits in my library with the others. On the next evening when I have enough time and energy, I will have to choose again.

I am not trying to persuade myself to stop buying games. I have simply begun to notice that when I want something to play, buying is often the fastest way to receive an answer. The excitement is real, but it satisfies the anticipation of play, not play itself.