How to be a dad and a gamer and still get a good night’s sleep – Reader’s Feature

With no time to play 60+ hour epics anymore, a reader discovers a way to stay in love with gaming and still be a good dad.

Pay attention Sony, I am a sad dad no longer.

I will soon turn 47 and have been gaming since I was in single digits. I was green with envy playing Combat on my friend’s Atari 2600. Seaside and caravan site arcade machines occupied a huge space in my childhood mind. I remember being devastated after spending hours typing in game code from a magazine into my Spectrum 128K, only for the resulting game to be broken and unplayable. Amiga 1200, Nintendo, PlayStation, all have delivered untold hours of enjoyment.

Gaming has been a cornerstone entertainment throughout my life. Something I’d look forward to and would occupy me even when not playing. I’d spend as much time reading about gaming as playing. Particularly through Digitiser on Teletext and then GameCentral’s Metro pages.

But I’m now a husband and father to two boys aged two years four months and 11 months. As a father, I’ve realised my gaming life is unsustainable. Time is simply against me. Nobody made enough of it. The maths doesn’t add up. It might be time to hang up the controllers.

Since my eldest was born I’ve tried to game as usual. By the time we’ve put the kids to bed and eaten it’s usually 8 to 8.30. We’ll watch an episode of a series together for an hour. My wife has no interest in gaming, so I’ve been waiting until she’s gone to bed around 9.30pm to stay up and enjoy a little of my own entertainment most nights.

However, with kids waking up at around 5am or earlier, and some terrible four month long sleep regressions, this strategy has often led to me being absolutely knackered during the day, due to burning the candle at both ends. Something I used to be able to do with ease. Now that’s completely unacceptable, when you find yourself driving during the weekend with two kids in the back of the car and struggling to stay awake during the drive then something has to give and changes need to be made.

In addition, fatherhood has changed me. I no longer have patience for things I used to enjoy. Long novels, long movies, epic games. I no longer have tolerance for anything that doesn’t respect my time. I’m stretched way too thin and my concentration and patience reserves are severely limited. In the tiny amount of time I have to entertain myself I need something that is satisfying and fulfilling in a self-contained hour or two. In that limited time gaming has to compete with other things I enjoy like watching movies, TV, and reading.

My gaming history in the past two years shows attempts to start dozens of games and I’ve crawled to bed way too late on numerous occasions, feeling dissatisfied, unfulfilled, and questioning whether gaming is something I even enjoy anymore. But an examination of those games also shows that I’ve been attempting to play the wrong kinds of games.

Metroid Prime, Rise Of The Tomb Raider, A Plague Tale: Innocence, Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, Gravity Rush, Spider-Man, Tales From The Borderlands, Mass Effect, Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

All of these games and dozens of others were started and abandoned, and all share in common that they demand a significant chunk of your time. Some enjoyment was had initially but ultimately ended in frustration and I’d often find myself wondering ‘Just how much longer am I going to have to play this for?’

Metroid was great nostalgia, but I quickly grew angry at the amount of ground I had to retread and replay if I died during a boss fight. Tears Of The Kingdom I played for several frustrated evenings and did not even make it out of the first tutorial area. Both abandoned.

Since becoming a father I have managed to complete some games. Firewatch, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Abzû, Luigi’s Mansion 3, and Virginia. I’ve played quite a bit of Mario Kart World.

What these games have in common is being short or you’re able to play them in shorter, self-contained bursts. But even with the shortest of these games, I often didn’t enjoy my time as I was rushing them and didn’t know how long they would take. Opening the map in Spider-Man: Miles Morales filled me with anxiety at the sight of all the symbols, as did traversing the open world filled with things I simply didn’t have the time to explore. Abzû took me a couple of evenings but for all I knew it was eight hours long. So I rushed it.

It is a bizarre feature of gaming that games differ massively in length but don’t advertise how long they will take you to play. So, you embark on these experiences with no concept of the commitment you’re making. Games attempt to deceive you and obscure their contract with you. Games are often judged on the value of the content and bloat they offer, and gamers in general tend to hold short games in contempt.

To do that you have to have the luxury of time. Something I no longer have. As a result long games are glorified and short experiences are hidden, padded and advertised as something that they’re not. I now understand games like Zelda, Grand Theft Auto 6, Mass Effect, Red Dead Redemption 2 are no longer things my life can realistically accommodate.

I’ve used the website How Long to Beat before but only really consulted it when already in the middle of a game. Wondering how long I had left to play and trying to decide whether to give up or plough on. Usually at that point it was because I was already frustrated and struggling to find enjoyment.

But I recently had a revelation. A YouTube search for short games recommended a game called A Short Hike that piqued my interest. I quickly purchased and played the game and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I went into the game knowing it could be played in a couple of hours, I was secure in the knowledge that I would get maximum bang for my buck in just one evening. With no anxiety that this experience would become a slog. The game is a delight and one of my favourite gaming experiences of recent years.

I began to research and put together a list of short games I could complete in an evening or two. Then it occurred to me I should combine this search with the elephant in the room: the dreaded backlog.

As a PlayStation Plus subscriber since the launch of the PlayStation 3, and a frequent wine-fuelled late night peruser of gaming sales and impulse buyer I have amassed a huge catalogue of almost 600 games on PlayStation alone. Within those I reasoned I must already own many short and sweet gaming experiences, hidden amongst the 30, 40, and 60 hour long epics.

I needed a way to cross reference my game catalogue with How Long to Beat and find out definitively how long each game I already own would take me to play, so that when I begin a game I can do so fully cognisant of the contract I’m entering into.

A quick ChatGPT discussion led me to the solution. I could allow the website Infinite Backlog to access my PSN profile and create a list of all my games that could be exported to a spreadsheet. Then ChatGPT wrote a Python code that would combine the list with How Long to Beat. An hour or so later I had a list. Unfortunately, at around 300 games, it was only half complete. PSN only shares the games you have previously opened or obtained a trophy in.

So all the games I’d purchased and never touched I had to add myself. But I ultimately arrived at a complete list. My next task was to create folders in my PlayStation library marked ‘1-2 hours’, ‘3-4 hours’, ‘5-6 hours’, etc. all the way up to ‘40+ hours’. I then methodically went through the entire catalogue of 600 games and organised them by length. This whole process took all my spare time over a week or two, so was no small undertaking.

What I found was sometimes surprising. I had no idea Resident Evil 3 is just six hours long and as a result I’m now keen to play it. I would have dismissed Power Wash Simulator as a novelty indie game but there’s 40 hours of game there. Portal can be beat in just three hours, Metroid: Zero Mission in only 4.5 hours. Half-Life 2 clocks in at 13 hours, double a typical Call of Duty campaign. Whereas Hollow Knight is a 27 hour commitment. I cannot believe a game like Nioh requires a commitment of 40+ hours. Ironically, most of Sony’s sad dad simulators are probably too long to be played by most dads.

The point is, it’s hard to judge a book by its cover and it’s frankly shocking that games aren’t clearly marked with their length. [We feel you’re underplaying the usefulness of How Long To Beat in your situation, especially as you can search for games that can be completed under a certain length of time, filtered by format. Publishers would be opening themselves up to litigation if they promised a game was X number of hours long and someone could prove they beat it more quickly – GC]

What I did find was that there is an embarrassment of riches in games that can be completed in under eight hours. I now have a new strategy. Most nights I now go to bed at the same time as my wife. We’re both in bed by 10 and should get a decent amount of sleep before the kids wake between 5 and 6am and be fresh and fully equipped to handle the day. But Wednesday and Sunday are now my nights to stay up late until midnight and do something for my own entertainment. Forearmed with the knowledge of what I’m undertaking.

So far, I have played A Short Hike, which was wonderful. Thank Goodness You’re Here! which I thoroughly enjoyed. The Stanley Parable, this was a misstep as I was completely unaware of the open-ended nature of it and ended up very annoyed at 1am wondering when it was going to end. Quake 2 on N64 – this one was great fun at first but quickly ramped up the difficulty and I’ll have to return to it again on the easiest mode. Finally, I’ve spent two nights playing Carrion and have enjoyed every single visceral, bone-crunching second of it, secure in the knowledge it will take me no more than three evenings to complete. All of these are games I never would have chosen to play by my old metrics.

I know that games clocking in at under six hours are an easy decision to make. Anything 10 hours or over is a much bigger ask and something I may only do a handful of times a year. And I am unlikely to choose to play a game lasting 20 hours or more knowing that’s a decision that will see me playing the same game for months.

Games should wear their length on their sleeve, as a badge of pride. Being short is not a failing, nor is being long a guarantee of enjoyment. As gamers we should all be liberated from false starts, frustrated abandonments and disrespected time. It should not be this hard to identify what we want to play, in the time that we have available to play it. For those faced with similar dilemmas I cannot recommend enough investing a bit of time to organise your game library this way.

All of this means my gaming landscape has narrowed, but that’s fine. I’m now enjoying gaming again in a way I haven’t been able to for a few years. And I’m handling those weekend car drives much better.

By reader thewearehere (PSN ID)

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