Should I mothball my console?

I love gaming. As I live in a flat alone, it's one of the things I look forward to doing in the evenings. I'm currently loving my first playthrough Dark Souls 3 and I'm looking forward to the release of Death Stranding 2 this week...

Or at least, I kind of am.

Because I woke up today thinking "You know what? I might just unplug my PS5 till the end of summer".

Why would I do this? Well, for one I've been thinking about all the different creative pursuits I've been wanting to do recently - learning to use Ableton, working on songwriting, art writing etc; also my ever-growing pile of unread books, my developing middle-aged paunch, and the fact I'm seriously thinking of quitting my job and going freelance.

All these things could be ameliorated by time usually taken up by gaming. So the sensible thing to do would be to have a break.

That said, if I were to put my PS5 in a box in my cupboard, will I regret it in a couple of days? Gaming is the way I wind-down. And I can't be super-productive all the time.

There's also a bit of me that succumbs to the "sunk cost" way of thinking: I have spent so much money on my console, my nice TV, not to mention the stack of games I want to get through eventually!

Anyone here make the occasional conscious decision to unplug their console? Or maybe it's not gaming necessarily, but to consciously stop doing something you enjoy in order to concentrate on other things?

Do it

Games are a pernicious time suck. I've enormously enjoyed spending many hundreds of hours playing games, I could also have spent this time much more productively. Though I do feel more lenient towards the time I spent playing games with other people.

I've done it. I've unplugged my PS5 and put it away! That said, I still have my Switch, my old PS2, and a SNES Mini to hand just in case I need a placebo - but those aren't anywhere near as addictive (I hope) than the PS5. I just couldn't face getting hooked on Death Stranding 2 all Summer, much as I've been looking forward to it all year. That can wait for the dreary Winter months.

If this lasts more than a week, I'll eat my hat though.

The most ridiculous gaming thing I ever did was to play the GTA IV multiplayer game Hangman's NOOSE dozens and dozens of times in order to accrue enough points in multiplayer to get... a "silver medal". Not even gold.

I love games, and movies and all sorts of time sucks, so I am very conscious and disciplined about setting limitations on myself. The downside of course is that it keeps me from making a dent in my backlogs, which is both a reminder of the perils of perpetual content and collector impulses and also perhaps that I should be more disciplined about expanding said backlog, lol. I do think particularly when one is alone, whether living alone, working from home, whatever, it's important and helpful to set limits, if only to force ourselves out of certain routines, or make us go outside, or get exercise, or things like that. Especially in the summer (deadly heat waves aside). Winter is the best time to play catch-up.

Yeah, the games will be waiting there for you when you come back.
The (huge) exception is F2P/daily login/live service/competitive multiplayer games, which, not coincidentally, are the most addictive and compulsive destroyers of time.

During the lockdowns I fell deeply into a gaming k-hole, gaming five/six hours a day. Replayed BOTW, RE4, played all the From games over and over. Elden Ring came out after lockdowns had lifted but I was still playing, sometimes gaming until the sun came up, distributing max'd weapons and max'd materials to strangers over Reddit.

In early 2023 I was looking toward a work trip to Europe, and in the weeks leading up to it, I was deeply invested in farming gems in Bloodborne, rushing through discovered chalice dungeons to murder a Pythmeru something-or-other over and over again, hoping to pick up an Abyssal with the right stats. I left for Europe, and when I came back, I didn't once turn on my PS5 or any other system.

I realised that this long-stretch of gaming-as-security-blanket had put an enormous dent in my productivity and social life. I partially excused myself for it all (the lockdowns were lonely! Elden Ring was really fun!) but yeah, I've returned to the attitude I had toward gaming in my 20s and 30s: it's something to save for when you're laid up in bed and unable to do anything else. (I didn't play Skyrim until 2012, when I was very sick with an infection, and played it constantly for ten days, a little recuperation/vacation without leaving my bed.)

Since giving up on it, I did come back and play through Baldur's Gate III over a three week period. I played Magic Research fairly constantly on my phone for a few weeks. But I don't actually miss gaming, at all.

Recently I was traveling for work and anticipated that I'd have some time in airports and on planes, and purchased TOTK for my Switch. I got barely anywhere, the interest is just absent. I want to read and write and socialise, you know?

I love having a good game going, mostly From games as I'm sure you all know by now. But I definitely feel like a bit of a dirtbag if I play for too long, and I'm glad there are some built-in limitations in my life schedule.

These days I play 30-40 mins a day while also stationary biking (lol, I know), so that's obviously constructive time. And I don't have the option of staying up late by myself on weeknights thankfully, because I could definitely see myself binging on Nightreign otherwise. And I'm also glad not to have a Switch or other mobile device so that it's not an option when traveling, then I will for sure read or listen to music.

Weekend afternoons are my free time, and I try to work on music first since that almost always gives me a feeling of well-being afterwards. If I finish working on something or hit a wall, then sure maybe an hour or two of video games as a treat.

It's got impulse control issues built into it, so up to you if you think you can create some limits or need to go cold turkey.

the games will be there when you get back! do the new creative stuff! or at least, i highly recommend that. i've picked up several new hobbies/passions/creative outlets the last few years. i didn't think about as a tradeoff, at the time, but the way it worked out was the games are nearly entirely gone and the tv shows and entirely gone. something's gotta give, and i don't miss the games/tv at all right now.

oh, but reading your op more closely, doing what i described above wasn't a conscious decision. the console is still there (unplayed), and i never made a decision, it was just about getting into other things and having to let others slide.

for me - and i think this is very personal and of course everyone has their own way - i don't tend to decide on my priorities beforehand, especially if i'm considering something new or different than what's come before. i tend to just take on the new thing and see how i feel about it, and if the new thing holds my interest strongly enough than something else will give

Have boot times on consoles gotten better? I can't imagine getting much use out of console gaming if I could conceivably solve a wordle in the time it takes to boot and resume/start a AAA title.

Boot times on my Xbox Series S are tolerable, but YMMV.

Is there something in the air? I too have been contemplating taking an extended break from gaming ever since I finished Expedition 33. Mainly because nothing else in that space is sparking my interest at the moment, and I would like to focus more on reading and making music. Might put the Xbox in the closet or sell it.

I have an ambivalent relationship with video games. There is one part of me that thinks they are all, without exception, time-sucking Skinner boxes, and another part of me that thinks they are all, without exception, beautiful and fascinating objects of art (even the bad ones and stupid ones). And of course both are true, but there's a tension there for anyone who doesn't want to feel like they're wasting their time.

I don't even actually spend that much time each day playing, but I do play them every day, and I think about them all the time: their place in culture and their history; the people who make them; where they are headed as a medium, etc.

I am also, in a way, very grateful for them? They provided me with some much-needed escape during difficult, lonely times as a kid. I legitimately feel like "giving them up" would constitute some sort of self-betrayal. I think a lot of people (and by "people" I mean mostly middle-aged men) feel similarly, which is why they take the hobby "seriously" in what I think is the wrong way: clinging to nostalgia, resisting change, obsessing over IP instead of following creators in the field, and refusing to concede that the medium is, and ought to be, for everyone. Those guys, more than anyone, could benefit from time away, IMO.

So yeah, I'm never gonna "give up" gaming but maybe now is a good season for putting the controller down and picking up something else.