Last week I finally decided to check out Arx Fatalis - an incredible early RPG title from Arkane Studios. Arx Fatalis has an innovative magic system where you draw runes on your screen, and the game’s really a blend of an immersive sim and an RPG - if you can think of something, it’ll probably work. It’s an awesome game, and it stands up incredibly well due to Arx Libertatis - a mod faithful to the original, which irons out many of the game’s quirks and issues. I mean Arx Fatalis is just Morrowind underground - what’s not to love?

I adored Arx Fatalis, but at some point, about half way through the game I just stopped playing. The section I was playing through was a bit tedious, and it wasn’t exactly clear where to go next. I had a couple of real life days between me and my desktop, and when I came back I got a notification that Farthest Frontier finally left beta and I couldn’t resist checking it out. Arx Fatalis still sits untouched, with my hero - Am Shaegar - sitting in some cave waiting for me to come back.

Arx Fatalis: a goblin king running past a guard in a hallway. Arx Fatalis: A goblin king’s off running to the toilet. Because he’s allergic to wine, and I mixed wine into his cookie dough.

I watched AngelikaTosh’s excellent how gaming became fast food, and it got me thinking how the way I consume games and shows has changed over the decades. And I don’t think I’m exactly to blame here, and there are some things I can do about it.

Here’s the thesis: AAA gaming industry spits out flashy games one after another, always-online media cycle invokes constant FOMO, and achievements, gaming discourse, and just the sheer quantity of (quite frankly very good) games out there makes taking your time with a single game difficult.

Let’s travel back to early 2000s, where roughly a 10-year old me inherits a PlayStation 1 and eventually a PC which was decommissioned from my mom’s work. There’s no Internet in our house, and I just convinced my mom to pay for a subscription to a scifi magazine, which also has a section on games.

A cover of 2007 issue of Mir Fantastiki, it's in Russian and depicts Neo from The Matrix stopping bullets in mid-air. Here it is, “Mir Fantastiki” or “The World of SciFi”, in all its mid-2000s glory (I couldn’t find an earlier cover). I think my mom still has the copies somewhere, alongside my toys, clothes, and baby hair (probably).

I didn’t have an allowance, so I’d have to ask my mom for games - and then convince her that the purchase is worth making. Naturally, frequent game purchases weren’t in the budget. I stopped by the local gaming store every day after school on my way home (okay, it was really a bootleg booth selling pirate CDs - ‘twas a different time and place). Thanks for not kicking out a kid who hung out in your booth every day without buying anything, kind CD pirate.

In school my classmates and I sometimes exchanged CDs too, which opened up more games to me - but you needed to offer good games to get good games back. I still associate certain franchises with some of my classmates from school.

All of that preamble is really meant to illustrate the low information (game covers at the bootleg game shop is majority of the information I had access to), low cadence (my magazine arrived monthly and only had maybe a dozen pages covering games), and relative scarcity (there are only so many games I had).

Young me would spend weeks, months playing a specific game. I haven’t really finish that many of them, and I just kind of messed around. Games were a lot more of a sandbox to me back then then they are now. In big part, that’s because I didn’t speak the language of games back then (yup, I got a whole essay on the subject). But not being aware of the (arguably less back then) packed release schedule, and not being able to easily get other games helped me stay with a game longer.

Now, if I want a new game, all I have to do is load up Steam, GOG, or another platform of my choice, click buy, and a game gets delivered to my desktop at the fiber optic cable speeds. And that makes it harder for me to stick with a game, or to push through some of the not-so-great-sections-that-could-lose-your-attention: and almost every game has those sections.

Here’s another anecdote. I don’t really play racing games - neither cars not the car scene ever appealed to me, but young me spent dozens if not hundreds of hours in Need for Speed: Underground 2. It was very different from typical role playing and strategy games I played, and I had a wonderful time, and it’s an experience I wouldn’t have had if I were playing today because I know which games interest me and which ones don’t, and I just wouldn’t have the patience to sit through enough of a game to gain appreciation for the type of fun racing games offer. I do somewhat mourn the times before I knew exactly what my tastes were.

A green sports car driving through the night city in Need fro Speed: Underground 2. Need for Speed: Underground 2 - the best (and probably the only) racing game I’ve ever played.

There’s this deep-seated belief that I have about optimal amount of fun, or the most fun I would have playing a game, and I just know that racing games won’t deliver that for me. And that’s limiting, because when everything I play is amazing and is tailored exactly for me - the amazing becomes the norm, and I don’t really get surprised by games.

And I don’t buy a rhetoric that games were better 10, 20 years ago than they are today. The games today are better, more creative, more imaginative, more polished, introduce better and more interesting ideas - and have decades of gaming history to build upon. There’s some crap too, like aggressive monetization, overabundance of early access titles, gacha mechanics… But crappy trends in games isn’t anything new, Oblivion sold horse armor DLC back in 2006, and all of late 2000s titles had mandatory tacked on multiplayer modes.

And I feel really sad about the fact that my attention span is so short, and that there are so many titles I want to try, and there are so many digital worlds I’d like to experience. And my time’s even more limited than ever, I’m a full grown adult with a job, a wife, and a child, all of whom want to spend time with me. And I want to spend much time with the latter two as well, of course. Which makes my gaming time oh-so-precious.

MMOs manage to captivate me for longer, especially old style titles like Old School RuneScape or World of Warcraft Classic (may I suggest another essay?) - but FOMO always knocks on the door. “Hey, you could be experiencing another game or catching up on your backlog instead of this”.

So, what is there to be done about this?

Well, first things first: this is okay. Gaming is a hobby, a passion, and you really don’t want your hobby to make you miserable. There’s no wrong way to enjoy a hobby - and if jumping from a game to a game, like a food critique with ADHD and a review quota to fill, is how you’re enjoying games today - that’s fine. There’s no wrong way to enjoy the medium, and I grant you full permission to feel great about how you enjoy your hobby.

However, I have been looking for opportunities to spend more time with the titles I enjoy, or maybe the titles I would enjoy even more if I were to put more time into them - without the pressure of completing them, playing a certain way, or collecting achievements (which to be honest I don’t really do, thankfully - I have no idea how I avoided the achievement hunting bug for so long).

Open PC Gamer magazine on the floor, with illegible articles and screenshots. Because print media takes time to create and a while to arrive, PC Gamer magazine focuses on less on breaking bite sized news and more on thoughtful exposes, interviews, and creative writing.

Taking a step back from the media has been helpful. I turned off algorithmic feeds in YouTube and only subscribe to content I know won’t overly focus on new releases, or invoke that much FOMO. I subscribed to PC Gamer’s physical publication, which I found to be much higher quality than I expected - it comes in monthly and offers a slower, more measured way to familiarize myself with the new releases and games I missed.

You know what else? I hated having PC Game Pass. Yeah, the very PC game pass that I wrote a 15,000 word review on back in May of 2025. Yeah, having access to hundreds of games just didn’t work well for me. I kept jumping across games I was excited to check out - hey, even if I don’t really care about a specific game or genre, I know a title to be an important gaming milestone, so I spend the time checking it out. Instead of playing a game I would, you know, enjoy.

Finally, I don’t keep as many games installed as I used to. Having a large SSD is nice, but when many games are within reach - it’s easy to jump between titles. Not having too many titles installed has been helpful in culling my desire to jump across titles, since installing a game adds a (however small) barrier which might make me pause. And who knows, maybe Am Shaegar will continue his trek down the dungeons of Arx Fatalis some day.