What I Like About Gaming (As a Reader)

When you’re faced with free time, do you find yourself gravitating towards one thing, or are you paralyzed by your options?

Many readers spend all their free time with their eyes on a book and don’t even question it. If you dedicate most of your time to reading, it might be your only hobby, or it might be your primary hobby, and you would not think twice when you have a spare moment before reaching for your latest read. Unless you’re like me, and reading is just one of your hobbies among many. Reading and writing may be my most consistent hobbies and the ones I am most devoted to, but I have a few other hobbies that require my attention every now and again, one of which is gaming.

If you search anything about gaming and reading, you’ll find a lot of discussion about whether gamers tend to also be readers and vice versa. Of course, there are many arguments on both sides. Often, people view one hobby as a mere distraction from another and even suggest that gaming and reading, which are both incredibly time-consuming hobbies, cannot go hand in hand. In this post, I want to explore why that is and why I think entertaining both hobbies is entirely possible and incredibly fulfilling.

Why People Don’t Game and Read

Setting aside the obvious explanation of ‘because they don’t want to’, I think there are a lot of reasons why people who might otherwise enjoy gaming and reading choose to only do one, so here are just a few of them:

It’s Time-Consuming

It’s no surprise that playing a game that takes over 12 hours to complete and finding time to read a 400-page book that might take about the same amount of time is difficult. A lot of people adopt the mindset that one hobby is stealing time away from the other, as opposed to believing they can co-exist. Therefore, it is clear why some people choose one over the other.

They Appeal to Different Audiences

Many believe that readers are part of an entirely separate realm from gamers and that the technology and storytelling of video games do not appeal to them. Gaming, as a multi-faceted experience, creates a visual, audio, and interactive event that readers may not be looking for, so it’s hard to see them as a viable target for games or gaming consoles and devices. Reading is often about using your imagination to fill in the blanks of the world you will enter, whereas gaming presents you with a world to which you must become accustomed. It’s clear that sitting down with a book is an entirely different experience from sitting down to a game.

It’s Seen as Unnecessary

Even though there are many games based on books—some of them with extreme popularity—and vice versa, it’s often thought that consuming the story in one form is more than enough, and the other form will not appeal to the other audience. Unlike with book to screen adaptations, which take a piece of literature and base its marketing going forward around the series or films being made about it, the book version of a game is hardly ever marketed to gamers and vice versa. Isn’t that strange?

Why I Think You Should Game and Read (if you want to)

Now that we’ve discussed some of the reasons you may not think gaming is really for you, I would like to share the reasons why I like gaming just as much as reading and value both equally.

Explore a World Beyond Just Story

When you read, your imagination fills in the gaps. You cannot see the characters, or the world they live in, or hear what their environment or voice sounds like, but you can imagine it. But you are in some ways, limited to seeing this world within the confines of the story being told and the way your mind interprets that. When you game, the experience is wholistic. You are guided through a world, you see everything the main character or characters see and hear what they hear, but you may also be able to deviate from the story. Instead of one or two sub-plots, you can get many in the form of side-quests, allowing you to delve deeper into the world and choose where you go.

This form of storytelling, of choosing how to follow a story, is mostly found in open-world games and offers an entirely different means of telling stories that can’t always be matched by a novel. Of course, novels can be part of a series with companion novels, which can kind of emulate the experience of side quests. But novels don’t always come with a choice in the way that video games do. Some may have the illusion of choice, but others do grant consequences directly related to your choices, which makes gaming an entirely different but worthwhile experience for readers who might have wondered ‘what if the main character had chosen this path instead’?

Puzzling Aspect

Many genres of books come with a puzzling aspect. Predicting the outcome of the story is something readers do often, piecing together the clues or information they have to draw a conclusion on how a book might end, what a character may do, or even where a series will go.

If you enjoy this aspect of books, video games have endless opportunities to encounter and solve puzzles inside and outside of storytelling. Maybe solving something is part of the plot, or maybe there is a puzzle that needs to be completed to advance the story further. Whatever it is, I think it’s perfectly possible for a reader to enjoy a game that allows them to put their mind to the test to continue watching a story unfold.

Different Forms of Immersive Story Telling

Ultimately, reading is just one way of consuming a story, and many video games boast rich, in-depth stories that a lot of readers would be happy to engage with. With a video game, you are entirely submerged in a world and its characters, just as you could be with a novel, but there’s the bonus of being able to experience that through music, cinematic effects, a carefully selected art style, incredible voice acting, and many kinds of gameplay.

You may not see engaging with both reading and gaming as necessary, but they offer similar experiences in very different ways that can be worth it if you’re interested. You can be just as emotionally connected to words on a page as moving images on a screen, especially when those images are bolstered with the additions I mentioned above.

Since hobbies are often seen as an all-or-nothing means of occupying your free time, people find it hard to believe that you can have more than one of them and that two hobbies that seem vastly different can appeal to the same people. If you manage your time well or accept that you can set aside reading for a short while and appreciate a different form of media and that’s okay, you can reap the benefits of experiencing as many exciting things as possible. Even if you love reading and want to read as much as possible, allowing yourself time to get to other things too will be worth it.

What hobbies do you have outside of reading?