Playing video games will always be a hobby of mine. With that being said, I have been contemplating how I play video games today and where my priorities are with choosing the games I play. One of the bigger realizations I have come to recently is how I’m trying to be less of a completionist and more focused on the games that I play. I wanted to share a bit of what that means to me and how I got here.

For those unfamiliar, a completionist is a gamer who strives to collect every achievement or trophy in a video game. This can relate to PC gamers who may unlock achievements in Steam games as well. When I first started playing video games, I found myself motivated to unlock achievements. I liked seeing my gamerscore increase and felt a surge of energy if I unlocked as many achievements as I could in a particular game. In high school, I had the time to devote hours to a video game.

When I went off to college, I didn’t bring my Xbox with me. Therefore, if I wanted to play video games, it was playing with others on their consoles. I would come home from breaks and play Xbox occasionally. When I would play Xbox, it would be games I felt a lot of nostalgia for, such as Gears of War, BioShock, or the Batman Rocksteady games. After college and moving into my own space, I developed a pattern where I wouldn’t move on from a game unless I collected all the achievements and trophies in that game.

The problem I quickly realized is that I don’t have time for that level of commitment. It ended up being more of a chore to play a game through multiple times than to feel satisfied that I finished the game and was ready to move on to something else. I found myself feeling frustrated, especially if an achievement was taking more time than I realized it would. It made me go back to the basics of why I play video games in the first place. I don’t want to spend hours collecting every item in a game. Part of the fun of leaving achievements or trophies unlocked is that I now have something to look forward to if I replay that game again in the future.

Since I have set aside my completionist ways, I have noticed that I’m motivated to play video games on the weekends. I have started playing through Resident Evil 2, and I don’t feel obligated to pull up a walkthrough of the game. I can play through the game on my own time and feel fully immersed in the story. I’m able to better balance my video game backlog because I don’t spend as much time on one game. I feel a lot more relaxed than I have been in a few years.

There’s still a part of me that finds joy in collecting achievements or trophies. I think that will always be fun for me, but now I’m able to play more video games since I’m not as strict about collecting everything right away. I’m looking forward to playing Resident Evil 2 in between rounds in Overwatch 2. I have had my eye on some new games coming out, including Pokémon Scarlet and Violet and Bayonetta 3. The way I play video games has changed, but my love for the hobby remains the same.