[COLUMN] Video Game Monogamy Is Overrated | by Marty Sliva

Okay, first off, I probably need to explain what I mean by that title. I’m not referring to romancing multiple folks in a Persona run, or trying to date as many townsfolk in Stardew as humanly possible. Rather, I’m talking about the act of focusing your attention on one single game at any given time and seeing it through till the end before you move on to the next one. Work aside, that’s the way I went about playing games for a lot of my life. And I think I might be over it, barring a few exceptions. 

I used to have a singular focus whenever I was playing a game, which probably stemmed from not having a ton of them growing up as a kid. This meant that I’d set my sights on whatever game I got for a birthday or Christmas, or more often whatever I might have rented on a given weekend. When I started a run of Chrono Trigger, I saw it through to the end before the cartridge left my SNES. When I rented Okage: Shadow King for PS2 because the ghost on the box looked cool, that was all I played that weekend. For the record, I still think that ghost looks pretty damn cool.

And honestly, that mindset stuck with me for a long time. When I started a game, I felt compelled to finish it before I moved on to anything else. Even if I wasn’t really digging a given game, I would still generally see it through until the end. 

It wasn’t until recently that I came to the realization that video game monogamy is overrated. And let me tell you, for the past few weeks, I have been out there having the time of my life with so many different games, it would make old me blush. 

Of course, the occasional game is still going to come along and capture my undivided attention from start to finish. Just this year, once I started playing the likes of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Animal Well, Astro Bot, Shadow of the Erdtree, and Metaphor Re:Fantazio, I only had eyes for them. But apart from these scattered experiences (which also happen to be some of my favorite games of the year), I’ve found myself more often going with the flow and jumping from game to game, platform to platform, and generation to generation.

Just this past weekend, I spent a bulk of my free time ping-ponging between a ton of different games. On Switch, I was oscillating between making small bits of progress in Mario & Luigi: Brothership, clearing out the final two dungeons in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and doing a bit of shiny hunting in a new run of of Pokemon: Let’s Go that I decided to fire up for no particular reason other than heavily associating Pokemon as a whole with the month of November.

This was accompanied by slow progress through my umpteenth run of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, though this time using the 3DS version. Spoilers: the game is still every bit as fantastic as it was in 1998. Also spoilers: I still get stupidly lost inside Jabu Jabu’s Belly, just like in 1998.

I’m still plugging away at Slitterhead’s lovable throwback jank on my PlayStation Portal, and I stand by my thoughts that it’s just a matter of time before this will become a cult classic. Rounding out my handheld gaming has been a revisit of the Nintendo 64 hidden gem Space Station Silicon Valley, which I’m jamming through on my Steam Deck for a possible future episode of The Archive.

On my personal Twitch channel, I haven’t found a big beefy game I’ve wanted to commit several weeks to, so I’ve been revisiting a smattering of random shorter games from over the past few generations. This included getting in the spirit of Gladiator II with the still-gorgeous Xbox One launch title Ryse: Son of Rome, revisiting Gris before diving into the follow-up Neva, prepping for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle with MachineGames’ Wolfenstein trilogy, and replaying Batman: Arkham Asylum because it’s a banger and you don’t need a reason to revisit banger.

So why the sudden shift away from focusing on one game? I’m trying to understand that myself. This strange mix of games I happen to be playing all deliver different kinds of dopamine hits, and I can also make a bit of progress in them without being terribly confused when I come back after doing the same in half a dozen other things. This kind of erratic movement between experiences also did a great job of providing snapshots of various moments in gaming history from the past 30 years.

It also helps that unlike many of my pals here at Second Wind, I don’t have part-time jobs in specific ongoing games like Smash, World of Warcraft, Dead by Daylight, or Rainbow Six: Siege. Without that single game racking up hundreds, if not thousands of hours of my time, it’s easier to spread that out across a ton of different games.

Another reason is simply that it’s become easier and easier to bounce from one game to another now that I’m surrounded by portable devices that almost encourage that kind of play. Over the weekend, not only did I spend time playing games on my Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck, but also less-obvious devices like the PlayStation Portal and 3DS, and I even charged up my trusty old Vita to fold that into the mix down the road.

And the future is clearly bright for handhelds. We should be getting our hands on the next-generation Nintendo hardware within the coming months, Valve has stated that an upgraded Steam Deck is a few years away, and reports point to both Xbox and PlayStation being in the early stages of development on new handheld devices of their own. And this isn’t even factoring in the explosion of portable emulation machines that are getting cheaper and more powerful every single year (seriously, it’s a problem, I already own several of these, and I’m continually tempted whenever a neat new model comes out). For nomadic players like myself, this is very, very good news.

I tried unpacking this new way of absorbing games to see if it’s the same in other mediums, but I really don’t think it is. I finish 99% of the books I read before moving onto the next. When I sit down with a movie on streaming or in theaters, I sit there till the end of the credits. I generally stick to watching one anime at a time, and only move on once the season has wrapped. But for some reason, my recent gaming habits have been plated like a sampler platter spanning time and space, and I’m perfectly okay with that.

This is that time of year when new releases start to wind down, and if you’re lucky, you finally have room to chip away at your backlog, or just replay something you’ve been meaning to revisit. Or if you’re like me, you’ll have time to do this with a bunch of different games from the past three decades. I’m sure this won’t last forever, as some early 2025 release is bound to solely occupy my attention the way some of my favorites of 2024 did. But until then. I’m going to enjoy my time surrounded by handhelds and just seeing where the wind takes me.