2016 Gaming

Happy New Year!  Time to look back at 2016

I'm not going to go into politics, but I will say that I'm not looking forward to 2017 due to what will be happening in the United States on January 20th.  That said, I found gaming a nice way to spend my free time (I watch very little television and few movies) in 2016 and I expect it to be the same in 2017.

I have been using Raptr to track my game time, but I'm starting to doubt the numbers.  I know my daughters and I had played 'Don't Starve Together' but Raptr showed the same total hours in 2016 as 2017.  When I looked in Steam, it shows 17 hours played total (10 hours in 2016, versus 0 in Raptr), which sounds about right.  I'm not looking for a precise number, so I'll start using both this year.

As has been true for the last few years, World of Warcraft dominated my time.  According to Raptr, I've played for 330 hours as compared to 371 hours in 2015.  Until November and December when my play time slowed down, I do expect I was averaging about an hour a day and that it was about the same last year.  I know this is minimal for other players, but it dominated my play time.

The next four games, I almost exclusively played with my daughters.  I played Minecraft for 24 hours (27 in 2015), Civilization V for 18 hours (only 2 hours in 2015), and Don't Starve Together for 10 hours (7 in 2015).  I also played Defender's Quest for 12 hours (a Tower Defense Game I mentioned before) and although this is a solo game, my daughters enjoyed watching me play, so it was primarily a group activity.  The only other significant games time I had in 2016 was playing Gone Home, which I liked, but I also did it partially because I thought my daughters might enjoy it, and 2 hours of the Walking Dead (again with my daughters).

It might be fun to have tablet, phone and 3DS game time tracked as well, but I don't and they are a pretty separate category so I don't feel any real compulsion.  So, not including those, I had almost exactly an hour a day average gaming (400 hours according to my spreadsheet).  Not much for your typical gamer, but given my limited free time, a pretty significant number.