Understanding Gamers: 10 Problems Gamers Face

Amazing, isn’t it? There are actually people out there, existing in the real world, that don’t know what MMORPG means. They also haven’t heard of Master Chief, don’t instantly know the weapons cheats for GTA 3 through San Andreas, and haven’t got the foggiest idea why people spend most of their existence holed up in rooms staring at their TVs playing games.

If you’re not a gamer and you’re reading this, you’re likely to be confused by what lies within. If you are a gamer and you’re reading this, you’re bound to find more than a few things that’ll strike a chord with you within. You are the people who truly understand just how these problems affect us all on a daily basis and, for that, we salute you.

Doing crazy things to fix your hardware/games

Rather than do the sensible things when our console/game refuses to work correctly and take it back to somewhere certified to make repairs, we instantly turn to the net to solve our problems.

Whether it’s draping the Xbox 360 in towels to apparently stop it Red Ring of Death’ing, blowing on GameBoy cartridges in the vain hope that they’ll work or something else entirely ludicrous, we’ll try them all in our quest to not be parted with our stuff for any longer than is necessary.

Who else ended up boiling their final disc of Lost Odyssey to get it to work due to the factory printing gunk on the disk? We certainly did.

Having A never-ending backlog of games

When you were a kid, life was simple. You went to school, ate some food, then gamed. You had all the time in the world, but you were quite content playing the same game over and over again because you simply didn’t have the money to do otherwise.

Then, quite suddenly, you’re an adult earning money. One game is now never enough; you’ll buy anything, as long as it’s cheap. Steam sales in particular are the most hideously appealing things ever to gamers who simply must buy everything for any amount less or equal to their bank balance.

Of course you won’t have time to actually play any of them, but it’s always nice to know they’re there, just waiting.

*Looks at stat screen* – 99%

Ask anyone who’s played Grand Theft Auto III how long they spent looking for hidden packages, and you’ll understand.

Nowdays, with the internet everywhere and wikis and tips flying around with reckless abandon, finding everything you need on a game for 100% is easy-peasy. Back in the day though this wasn’t the case; you were instead stuck with a crappy map from a gaming magazine and had to track down every-single collectible item in the area and – almost certainly – you were guaranteed to miss just ONE and had to go through them all again to find which one it was.

There is no joy greater than the moment you find that last, hidden thing that prevented you from hitting the majestic 100% total.

Completely losing track of time

You’re pretty sure you’ve only been gaming for about half an hour but once you’ve finally tear yourself away from the screen you’ve found that the world has been taken over by giant ants and the apocalypse has come.

Ok, maybe not that bad, but it’s so easy as a gamer to find yourself missing out on so much of the day as time simply seems to vanish before your very eyes when you come out of a gaming spell.

People have lost entire chunks of their lives playing RPGs – you can completely skip over an entire decade thanks to Wacraft and Skyrim combined.

Just straight up staring at your games collection, with nothing to play

Your gaming collection, once a humble pile of discs scattered merrily to the winds of your house, has now grown to gargantuan size. Spending sprees, discounts and the collector in you have all combined together to make you purchase every single game known to man, giving you almost infinite choice about what to play.

Despite this, you’ll often find yourself literally sitting and staring at your gaming collection, wanting to play absolutely none of it. You may pick up a case in triumph, remember you can recall everything that happened on it, then pop it back on the shelf and the whole process starts again.

If only we erase our memories and start everything all over again.

How changing the disc is a thing

Come on, hands up. Which of you have all wished at some point that the big gaming console makers had removed all of the social sharing functions, motion control nonsense and invented something that’ll change our discs for us?

While you can do practically everything on a console from the comfort of your sofa or favourite squash gaming chair, you still, in the modern world no less, have to get off your backside to actually change the disc.

About 60% of the time this requires far too much effort and we’ll quite happily refuse to do so and keep playing whatever’s in just because of utter, sheer laziness.

Needing every collector’s edition for no real reason

Those wily marketers. Not content with snatching away a fortune’s worth of our money already for just a game, they’ve now invented an even more expensive money-sink, the Collector’s Edition!

Of course we know that it’s just a collection of random stuff chucked in a box that somehow costs far more than usual, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want it!

Collector’s Editions are both causing a problem on our bank balances and rapidly causing us to run out of space to put the damn things. The boxes don’t usually fit in storage areas either, which is just plain inconsiderate.

“Just…one…more….level”

You will go to bed after this one. Seriously, you will. You know you have to get up at Ridiculous O’clock in the morning. You’ll just finish up doing this bit, hit a nice point to stop and then go to bed. Yep. Totally will.

Before you know it, it’s now six in the morning and you’ve completely missed your chance to get any sleep whatsoever. It’s not your fault – after the bit you did there was another bit that was really exciting and gave you new things to play around with.

Then there was another bit after that…aaand another after that. If only games weren’t so damn fun!

Redoing A Custom Character JUST Before Completion

It’s a beautiful thing, choice. Many games now are all about choice, giving you the ability to mold your own adventure through the quests, events and even your own character’s appearance.

The latter of these is a huge task that requires much preparation and thought. You’ll more than likely spend hours wrestling with the bizarre faces the games’ system generates, constantly clicking the Random button in the hope that the next face won’t look like a cross between Colonel Gaddafi and a pile of sludge.

When you’re finally finished you can jump into the game, to which you’ll probably never see your characters face again for the next hundred hours, making the task utterly and totally pointless – yet utterly necessary dammit.

That feeling when a game locks up and you can’t remember where you saved

Throwing caution to the wind like a true rebel, you’ve literally spent the last four hours of a game not saving once.

Almost as if karma was serving up an extra-special dollop of humble pie, your game will, almost without a doubt, decide to completely freeze on you and force you to hit reset and lose all of your progress.You will then not play on said game for weeks in retaliation.