Why am I late to the (gaming) party?

Recently a friend asked me why I’m usually late to the party when it comes to playing video games. I’ve answered this question in the past but it’s worthwhile to answer it again on this website since my Late to the Party series has been slowly grinding along for years now and there’s probably a few other people besides my friend who have been wondering the same thing.

As you can probably guess, the main reason I’m late to the party is because of time constraints. Like most adults I have a full-time job and various responsibilities so I don’t have as much freedom to play as many games as I’d like. The college days where I could potentially sit down on the couch and play for six to eight hours straight are long gone. If any of you are still in high school, college, or another period of life where you have tons of free time my advice is to enjoy it while you can—these days do not last forever.

Along with the general lack of time there are also a couple of other smaller reasons as to why I’m late to the party. Some recent games like Horizon: Zero Dawn and God of War are being intentionally postponed until I get a 4K TV. I’m sure these games would look great on my current 1080p TV but I’m getting close to purchasing a new TV so I’ve decided to hold off on games like them that really push the edge of video game graphics. A few other games I’ve delayed playing because I knew they would get heavily updated in the months (and possibly years) after their initial releases. Destiny 2 is a good example of this. I loved the first Destiny, but I didn’t purchase Destiny 2 at launch because I had a strong hunch that Destiny 2 would follow the same pattern as the first game and not start to find its footing until year two. As it turned out, I was correct in my prediction.

Strangely enough, one more reason is that I end up losing a lot of time that could have been spent gaming on writing about games for Late to the Party. Being both a mediocre writer and the type of person who agonizes over every word results in each entry of Late to the Party taking a long time to produce. Currently I’m trying to put together a post on Battlefield 1 that should be published next Friday and all the hours I’m spending on creating a coherent writing piece are hours that I’m not using to enjoy the game or getting started on other games.

To address that last reason I’ve been thinking that there may be certain games I’ll simply choose not to write about, or I could intention hold myself to a small word limit, like 500 words or less. Those posts would be like mini-editions of Late to the Party and would probably be structured differently than the mainline entries. 2019 might be a good year to experiment with this new approach.