Collection... can be nice?

I've been pretty busy with school over the past few months. I'm working on bringing my grades up, after a horrific semester back in 2016 that basically delayed my getting a degree almost three years, so I don't have a lot of time for video games. That said, video games are really important to me, so when I do have a bit of free time to play I'll take it. And it's over these busy months where I can only play games for a short time that I've discovered a previously despised aspect of games can actually be incredibly relaxing -- collection quests.

Normally I avoid collection quests. I'll be on board at first, but after a while I get bored with the tedium of it all. I just have a short attention span, I guess.

But I've found that tendency to get bored easily has been really helpful in keeping a responsible gaming schedule. Whereas I can lose myself for hours exploring or playing main story quests that provide lots of stimulation, I can't devote the same time and energy to collection quests, so I end up quitting the game after awhile.

The game I've been playing the most recently is Dragon Age: Inquisition, and it's the perfect game for this kind of "time-management gaming." I'll send my advisers on missions that take a few hours, then go off on a collection mission like finding shards or filling a certain number of requisitions. I can handle that for about thirty minutes to an hour. Then I'll quit. The next time I start my game up, the advisers have completed their missions, and depending on how much I have to do in the real world I can either repeat the process or go on a more interesting mission, one that has the potential to lead to more missions and take up a larger chunk of my time.

I'm by no means a competitionist, but I feel like if I stick with this method for games that have these kinds of time-consuming collection quests, I might be able to 100% one someday. To me, it feels like a much more responsible way to game and not waste all my time. Collection quests have a unique quality that both satisfies my desire for instant gratification while wearing on my short attention span, making them the perfect tool to manage my gaming time.