Gamer's itch
I keep getting this urge to play something, but nothing in my library or any store satisfies it. Here's a name for that feeling, and a hunch about why.
Scene
Imagine this. It’s Tuesday evening. Your kid is asleep. Your wife is out. You’ve got the kingdom to yourself. Chores and responsibilities for the day are done. You’ve been looking forward to this moment for a while now. Today is the day you’ll lose yourself in a game. Something new, something fresh. You’ve got that urge to play something, but you can’t quite put your finger on it.
You look at your library. Meh, you’ve played most of it or aren’t interested in the games you haven’t touched yet. A few titles seem to come close to what you’re looking for, but none feels quite right. You start browsing the stores. What’s new? What’s on sale? What’s well received? You burn through discovery queue after queue. Nothing seems to land. Then you look at the clock. It’s time to go to bed already. You just wasted your evening trying to find a game that’d scratch it.
The itch
This is actually how my Tuesday went this week. And I’ve had it before as well. I call this the gamer’s itch. I don’t think that’s an established term (yet 😉), but I feel it perfectly conveys what it is: an urge to play something where nothing in your library or the stores can satisfy it.
What it isn’t
You might think this is just wanting to play a specific game. Nothing new there. But the itch isn’t that. Nor is it gamer’s block (the gamer’s equivalent of writer’s block, which basically comes down to decision paralysis). A curated shortlist wouldn’t help here.
A hunch
As I mentioned, I’ve experienced this plenty of times. And I’ve started noticing a pattern. It happens more often to me if I have longer periods where I don’t play games. During those periods, every now and then a thought pops up: “It’d be nice to play something soon”, or similar thoughts. They build excitement. They add up. The hype grows. Until there’s a moment where that hype could be satisfied, but at that point the hype has already surpassed any realistic chance of matching it.
Closing
I’ve noticed the itch tends to fade once I stop hunting. Some evenings I’m not looking for anything, and a game I’d dismissed weeks ago suddenly sounds right. But that’s hard to remember mid-itch. If you’ve found a more reliable trick to scratch it, I’d love to know.