Last week, I talked about Helldivers 2 and how much of a blast it’s been. Well, here we are another week later and it’s still all I wanna play. It’s sort of a problem in that there are other games I’m “supposed” to be playing and making progress on; games like Alone in the Dark and Master Duel.

Here’s the thing though: there really is no “supposed to” with gaming as a hobby, you know? It’s just that backlogs and battle passes have sort of given gaming a job-like feel over the years that it really shouldn’t have. In reality, you should always use your gaming time however you want. I dunno about you, but I’d forgotten that.

At some point, gaming changed from a chill pastime into something closer to an obligation. I had keep up with the new stuff, had to stay in the loop, had to keep playing and finishing new stuff, had to keep moving. To linger or spend too much time in one game was to “waste” time that could have gone towards progression in another one.

Gaming has still been fun, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t starting to feel less enthusiastic about playing stuff. I mean, who wants to come home from work only to have slog another set of tasks and quotas? I certainly don’t, and that’s been making it more difficult.

At the moment, the only game I wanna put my game time into is Helldivers 2, and that kind of made me see the silliness of this self-imposed job. What does completing/finishing games matter if it’s not what you want to be doing? What’s the point if it’s not fun? Unless you’re streaming or something, there really isn’t any reason to jobify your hobby, so why do it?

So yeah, I guess you could say Helldivers 2 snapped me out of this and is helping gaming to feel more like it did 10 years ago: simple, worthwhile and fun. Heck, maybe I’ll go back and play some more old favorites when I’m done!

---

What about you? Have you wound up jobifying gaming or another hobby? How did you snap out of it, or how did you avoid it?

Image from the Helldivers 2 Steam page