The Gaming Experiment

I like videogames. Let me rephrase that, I love videogames. Some might argue that I love them too much. I would argue against that, but it could be argued. A couple weeks ago, I was looking at my game collection. It’s quite extensive and if I were to focus on this generation’s console offerings, it’s still quite impressive. But one thing struck me while I was scoping out the games… I haven’t beaten or even played a considerable amount of some of these games that I own. I buy buy buy, but rarely sit and play games to completion. This is probably a common problem among this generation of gamers. It certainly is among many of my friends. But I want to change that. I want to be able to look at a shelf of games that I spent full price for, and see games that I have triumphantly completed!

I have set myself a goal for this gaming experiment: Complete 1 game per week.

For somebody like me, who has a fulltime job, an hour commute, and a quasi-regular social life finishing a game a week will be tough. But I will continue to push forward.

Some of the games I choose to play in this experiment, I will be starting right from the beginning (Uncharted) while others I will be chipping away at as this experiment continues. I may not only play one game the entire week, so for example, I might play a game like the new Bionic Commando while also interspersing some huge RPG like Infinite Undiscovery. IU is a long JRPG that will definitely take me longer than just one week to finish, however, in a couple weeks of chipping away at it, that might be the game I finish to completion that week.

So what systems is fair game for this experiment? Well, in a word, everything! I have just about every console however I will be focusing on the last two system generations and the handhelds. So, PS3/PS2, Xbox 360, Wii/Gamecube, DS/GBA, and the PC. I think my backlog of games that I would like to have in this experiment run across all of those platforms.
Another question that I posed to myself was what constitutes a game? Is it only a full retail release? Or do downloadable games count too? I think that anybody with some interest in videogames over the last year or so would see a definite move to more hearty and full games coming to gamers via the series of tubes called the internet. I have decided for this experiment, I will be allowing all new downloadable games like Flower for the PS3 or a game like World of Goo for the Wii and PC. However, I will not be including old downloadable titles from the Wii Virtual console such as previously released older titles such as 8-bit through 64-bit games.

I think that this will be a fun and challenging experiment that I hope will rekindle that ‘je ne sais quoi’ that made me fall in love with videogames in the first place.