Silly Gaming Habits

The great thing about gaming is that if a small group of people play a game then they'll usually play it in slightly different ways.  Weather it's going stealth or guns blazing in Deus Ex, genocide or pacifist in a game like Undertale or even something as simple as party selection in an RPG, everyone experiences a game in a slightly different way.

That said, there's a couple of weird habits that I have when playing games that I think are shared between quite a large number of players no matter what your play style is.  So because I'm feeling a bit lazy today here's a numbered list of weird habits I have while gaming 

1) Item Hoarding 

This is a bad gaming habit that I feel A LOT of people have.  Probably the most prevalent when playing a survival horror game but present in all genres.  Let's say your playing Resident Evil and you find a sick grenade launcher and a handful of grenade rounds.  That's going to come in handy for when you fight a boss or come across one of those Hunters right? Fuck no! What if you need it for later?! That constant worry that if you blow through all your cool shit now you'll make the next part an almost impossible struggle.  

What this results in is you getting to the end of the game with stacks full of all the best shit and the credits roll with all the cool stuff rotting in a box or at the bottom of your pockets.  This is disgustingly true for almost every RPG I've played.  I end up killing the big bad guy and he goes down in a ball of flame while my inventory spills over with max heals and other useful crap that I never used "just in case".  Even know as I play Dark Souls 3 I have so much ember I could probably use 3 in all the remaining boss fights and still have some left over but there's something in the back of my mind that just won't let me use them.  

2) Rounded Item Numbers 

This one is extra stupid because it doesn't affect ANYTHING but if I don't do it I get a deep feeling of disgust for myself.  

Let's say you're playing an RPG and you come across a town.  You go to the shop and they are selling  potions.  You look into your inventory, you're carrying like 63 of the things and you haven't needed to pop one in a LONG time.  Well that doesn't matter because now you HAVE to buy two more to make that 65 or you ain't ever leaving this town.  In extreme cases even 65 is no good, and you'll either have to buy 7 more to make it 70 

I knew one guy with such an extreme case of this that when playing Final Fantasy 1 together I tried to leave a town with 19 potions in my inventory and he violently wrestled the controller off me to backtrack into town to buy 1 more because "it's just not right".  Never fuck with a man and his supply numbers 

3) Multiple Saving
I feel that this habit comes from the same part of the brain that's responsible for making you horde items.  You've finished a session in whatever you're playing and you go to save.  You hit save and you watch it until the "save complete" sign comes up.  Then you reach for the power button but you stop dead right before you push it....."did I just save?"  So you sit back down and do it again and this process can repeat a number of times before you're fully convinced that your progress has been properly recorded.

This creates an extra layer of mental torture when you play a game that doesn't have traditional saving and just auto saves everywhere.  You see the little icon for the save and you turn off the system but you just can't trust it.  You spend the whole day wondering if it really did save and it eats at your sanity until you get home only to realise that everything was totally fine.  I've had situations where I've turned off a game like that, only to return to the console about 5 minutes later and powered it back on again JUST to make sure.

4) 100%ism
Now if you're the kind of person who buys only one game, completes it fully and then trades it in then congratulations you're some kind of mutant that needs to be captured and tested upon by the government and also this point doesn't apply to you.

Many however suffer from the dreaded backlog.  Games sitting on a shelf or in an online library just waiting to be played but you can't yet because you've not finished the X amount of other games that came before it.  A backlog is made worse if you're the kind of person who's obsessed with seeing a little 100% marker or getting the platinum achievement or whatever for whatever game you buy.

Personally, my backlog is so huge that I can't bring myself to even consider buying certain games because I know that if I start playing it my backlog will never progress or, even worse, I'll never get around to playing it.  Breath of the Wild is a great example of this since I really want to own my own copy of it but I know that I'll chase that 100% so obsessively that the hundreds of games in my steam library alone will continue to sit, unplayed, for god knows how long.

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These are the ones that plague my life but if you have any other weird ticks or habits when it comes to your gaming let me know in a comment! 

Item Hoarding: The Dumbest Habit

There's a lot of weird habits that you gain when you play video games for long enough.  Both in and out of game, an enthusiast may have some kind of habit that some may find to be a little OCD or a bit strange.  Like my biggest weird thing is keeping a spreadsheet of all the games I've beaten since 2011 and how many times I've beaten them.  I dunno why I do that shit but I find it sort of enjoyable to see that list get bigger and bigger over time.

Anyway, one habit that almost all gamers have is item hoarding and when you take a minute to think it's a really weird habit to have.  What I mean by this is you'll be playing a game and you'll be getting things like ammo or supplies but you'll be doing everything in your power to NOT use them.  The game is giving you these things for the express purpose of using them to give you a better chance against whatever enemies there are but someone who suffers from video game item hoarding syndrome will stubbornly not use it at all, even up to and after the final battle.

Resident Evil 4 is a good example of this.  I might buy a Shotgun or find a bunch of ammo or grenades and shit and how do I try to kill all the enemies?  1 bullet to the head, round house kick followed by knife slashes until they stop moving, rinse and repeat as often as possible.  It's not even like ammo is hard to come by in RE4, it's more like I'm hard wired to use as little resources as possible. 

This habit isn't just exclusive to one genre either, I find myself doing it in almost every game imaginable.  In FPS games, especially classic ones, I'll be using the shitty pistol or melee combat as much as possible so I don't have to use my big guns with the scarce ammo.  RPGs?  All those full healing items will sit in my inventory for the entire game and never see any use even during the final battle.  Survival Horror? Better run away from everything because those bullets and healing ain't going anywhere. 

These things are designed to help me through the game, designed to make my life easier but I stubbornly decide not to.  It's led to many a moment where I'll waste a great amount of time on a boss or section of a game just because I'm so worried about whats after that I'm trying to save my good shit until I really REALLY need it.  It's a dumb habit that I'm sure that I'll never shake for as long as I game.