TurtleStomp

This image represents my gaming habits good and bad points

This is the first of my written rants to appear here, and they’ll probably end up here before their original home over at MOREtotheGAME because they feel more… bloggy, besides I’m a whore for attention and two sites are better than one!

This time, it’s gaming habits. Recently, myself and various other MOREtotheGAMErs signed up to Raptr, a Last.fm-style website for games that’s been running since late 2008 (Never let it be said this feature isn’t cutting edge). Raptr takes your account names for various gaming services and compiles your games, playtimes, achievements and the like into your account, publishing new additions to your friends’ newsfeeds.

This happens in automatic realtime for most PC games and all 360/PS3 games. Other platforms can be added manually, but are less accurate and often forgotten by me at least. But it pretty much works as well as it can do, with older platforms having no way to automatically report playtime anyway! Steam achievements, 360 achievements and PSN trophies are all synced automatically too, so if you’re the achievement whoring type it’s quite handy for bragging rights.

Immediately I began to notice just how much time I spent gaming. The week before I signed up, I had to estimate how much time I spent gaming a week on a beta registration form. After a lot of umming and ahhing I think I ended up making a joke about my memory, and guessing around 15 hours a week. A week after installing raptr I’d played about 27 hours of games, and that wasn’t including the few times I broke the client, so probably around 33 hours in total, scary.

Another thing about this realtime sharing of what I was playing, is that I began to get people shout at me over my habits. Some people irritated I was playing instead of talking to them (Yes, I’ve chosen shooting zombies over a one-sided conversation with you about how you’re pissed off at someone I don’t know, deal with it?), had some fellow photography students yell at me for gaming when I had coursework to write and even had my grandmother comment on facebook after Raptr had sent an automatic message to my wall. Yeah, gaming isn’t seen as a legitimate hobby by many, and they’re usually the type to enjoy voicing their opinion.

Of course, this is less a criticism of Raptr, it’s more a lesson in how I set up my permissions on Facebook, but y’know.

The final and possibly worst reason sharing my gaming habits is terrifying, is that my gaming friends can see them, and criticise what I’m playing. Yes I play far too much Bejewelled Blitz,  but please don’t call me a ‘casual gamer’ as if your hours of COD make you a better gamer than me. I like flash games, they’re an interest of mine… maybe 40 hours of Mass Effect don’t appeal to me? Hmm?

So yes, Raptr. Not without it’s drawbacks, but overall an interesting service. One I shall remain using, especially when I get my gaming PC back.