There’s a lot of games coming out in October. The genres range from strategy to sports to action to horror. All of them come out within a single month. You should take advantage of all the options in front of you and play a game you don’t like, or think you don’t like.

I know my own likes and dislikes pretty well, so I’m the best example here. I have avoided strategy games for a long time. I had a good excuse for several years because my PC wasn’t able to run any of them that well. But today, that’s no longer a problem, and I still haven’t played a proper strategy game for more than a few hours. I think I gave XCOM: Enemy Unknown a little bit of my time, but Crusader Kings 2 still sits in my Steam library.

That’s why, come October, I’m going to force myself to play Civilization: Beyond Earth (I want to play Alien: Isolation too, but that’s going to take some real convincing). What better way to really start into strategy games that with the most popular series? I’m going to play it hopefully before something more familiar like Dragon Age: Inquisition, a third-person action RPG that’s probably not majorly different than the last one.

I might hate it, or I might love it. If I don’t play it, I’ll never know either. It’s a simple concept to understand and harder to actually apply to yourself. As someone who is enthusiastic about games and often speaks as an authority on them through my writing, I’d feel better knowing more about the medium and the different ways it can be used.

This concept isn’t new. As we grow older we settle into things we find comfortable. When I was young, I would pick a game to play regardless of its genre or developer. I would play the game and see if I like it. That’s it. We lose that curiosity with age and it can be damaging to your appreciation of games or any other media–although, I think it’s more challenging with games because they require such a large investment of time and mental capacity than say, a film.

So, if you’ve have the resources, I urge you to play one game in October that you wouldn’t otherwise. You never know what might come of it. If you like it you have a whole new type of games that you can play, and if you don’t, you know exactly why you don’t. Can’t hurt, can it?