Ask Lemmy

Play whatever you enjoy. Maybe you feel like you don't have the time to sit down and invest yourself in a story die to other commitments like work or family. That's normal.

It's your free time. Gaming should be a fun hobby, not a chore.

Wish more games would have a "I have not played this in a month and need a quick recap" mode.

Same. 100%. I don’t love it though, tbh. I’d love to get immersed in something new again.

And MP has always been toxic, but goddamn…as a woman you just get sick of some of the shit you hear. I have to straight up turn text chat off, and it’s rare that I go on mic chat even though good communication would help a game so much.

A gaming burn out you say? Yes, I only play co-op games anymore. I need a teammate to explore the game. Solo games are like getting into a television series that has 16 seasons. Just to much work ahead.

Yup. My first console technically was a NES (technically Atari 2600 but I was really young). Been playing console and PC games ever since. I used to love games. Wanted to design them and even got a job as a game tester and GM for WoW (tester made me realize I didn't want to work in the industry). I don't know when it started but outside of a few instances I can't get into games anymore. I think there are a few reasons (though they're sort of overlapping).

• I've already experienced a lot of it. I've saved countless kingdoms, stop hundreds of bad guys from blowing up stuff, repeatedly discovered the mysteries of crystals/labs/villages. There isn't a lot of "new" stuff.

• I don't have consistent chunks of free time and don't want to use all my freetime playing games. I can't always invest in a long story and a lot of games take a while to get started.

• As I get older I value my time more. I'm not necessarily old but looking at life expectancy I've hit the midway point. That just causes me to evaluate my freetime differently. Unfortunately that doesn't mean I am necessarily making the best of use of my time but stops me from spending 8 hours of a Saturday playing the new Spider-Man.

• I find my need to unwind and relax increases with age. After a long stressful day at work I don't necessarily want to engage with complex systems or drawn out stories. I just want to start playing and not have to think. I also don't want to be stressed. I find online competitive games to be stressful.

There are other issues like the market has changed and less games align with what I enjoy. Social aspect of games are mostly gone for me.

I think it comes down to just knowing what is good. When you're young you don't have any experience to judge quality by. As you get older you can rapidly assess that something sucks, even if other people are pumping it up. Either in terms of gameplay or plot or whatever, now you have standards. Also, a lot of modern games just don't respect your time, and as you get older you realize your time is valuable so you just don't have the patience for that.

I'm in my 30s, I still game, but I'm a lot quicker to just go "this sucks" and move on to something else.

I kinda need to be in the mood to play a game. Usually, once I finally start playing something, it's easy to keep going. But sometimes I'll have to be pretty bored before I'll play a new game. I still haven't played RDR2, but I seem to be more eager to play metroidvanias and PS1-style indie horror games.

I get into story games a lot more now. If it’s hard, repetitive, or a grind it simply isn’t fun, I have reality for those types of challenges.

As I've gotten older and more busy, it's been harder to get into games. I can't play 4 hours a day any more, so the game has to fit into my schedule. Plus a lot of games take like 60 hours now. I liked Stray a lot because it was fun and I beat it in like 3 hours.

So yeah, I feel pretty much the same.

I don't enjoy gaming anywhere near as much as I used to, and a lot of AAA games just don't appeal to me anymore.

Indie games are where I get most of my enjoyment from gaming now and looking forward to Jusant, and the DLC for Lake in November. But apart from that, I'm not really fussed.

Damn you fromsoft, ive gone hollow

I’ve lost all patience for gaming. I tried play one of the Wolfensteins a few weeks ago. The beginning of the game is basically on rails, and I was required to put out a fires or something, I was like, uh I just want to shoot some fake people, to hell with this.

My taste in games has changed a lot over the years - I think to help accommodate adult life. As my time has gotten more spoken for I look for games that can quickly be picked up and put down. And as I've become more bitter and misanthropic, I've largely given up on multiplayer (except Tertis 99!). Basically things I can play when I've got any amount of downtime and I don't need to follow a story line, or disappoint other people, or watch cut scenes, or even have my volume up.

I'm really into colony sim / base building / and automation types games now. Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, and if I go more than 3 days without playing Oxygen Not Included I start to get the shakes. I also like low key survival games like Don't Starve, Astroneer, and No Man's Sky.

I've been playing (and enjoying) BG3 but I don't have enough time to get immersed so I'm still in Act 2 on my first play through.

Agreed that it’s harder now that we’re older, especially if you work a lot or have kids/family responsibilities.

The most rewarding aspect of playing a game these days (IMO) is the social aspect of it. Whether that be playing with friends or sharing a ‘physical’ neutral space with other players like in an MMORPG. If you have a friend or a group of friends it’s fun to start random games together and experience them with someone. If you’re a solo gamer you need a much greater reason to start a new game, which is harder as you’ve described.

I don’t have many friends who game consistently, so I’m basically left to choose between going back to an MMORP like WoW (ugh), which after a while you realize is still lonely unless you really invest in making friends on your sever, or playing a new game at launch. Even if it’s a single player game there’s a lot to be said about playing a new game as soon as it releases. You get that collective sense of community because everyone is going in fresh and finding out secrets and solutions and sharing them with each other online. It doesn’t feel like you’re totally alone, and although it’s short lived it can feel rewarding. It’s like watching a weekly release show and joining in post-episode discussions online. You can’t recreate that experience after the fact.

Modern AAA games? Yeah. But many smaller and indie games are still good. I loved Ion Fury and Turbo Overkill. Some of the best games in the past 5 years imo.

Yeah. I have lots of games in my steam library but I only play tf2 lol

I think something people haven't mentioned yet is that games are so much a digital media now that where I used to be able to keep infinity games at all times in a CD book, I now have to selectively decide which games get to occupy my limited hard drive space, and installing a new one means uninstalling another, and waiting to redownload it, and between my limited drive space and less than amazing network speed, those can absolutely influence what I'm able and willing to play at any given time.

It's more logical to keep ten games I know I like installed rather than choose one of those to cut off in place of a new unknown quantity.

Also, compared to other major sentiment I see in this thread, I actually quite like tutorial sections of games. I'm often very interested to see what the game itself has in store in terms of exactly what mechanics and systems it contains and how they execute them, and how that stacks up compared to reviews or word of mouth, which are often vague, biased, or missing portions of the experience.

After I fully understand what a game is trying to do, I fall off the wagon often times as it sinks into a routine instead of a novel learning experience, or maybe I actually love it, but standards continue to increase as more and more novel ideas and fusions of genres are created and become existing products. It becomes more difficult to make something that's not something you've already done, but slightly worse or only slightly better.

I still "get into games" plenty, but it doesn't happen quite as often, and it's the "sticking with" them that becomes more desired and elusive.

Yup. Used to be it was quite easy to find the games that were worthwhile to play since there was very little for profit games and not too much choice. Nowadays only if I hear from people I trust to have a taste for the games I want to play will I actually get excited. Its just easier to go back to classics because you know you're going to have a better time than most things you buy new.

Always on the look out though, gems are still being produced, they just became a lot less findable.

Happened to me where I felt loss if enjoyment over any game, that it felt like a waste of time and a chore. That eventually passed, definitely find them fun again.

I did video games professionally for ten years (grew up on the ZX81, C64, Amiga) and since then I have a hard(er) time because the only things that changes in new games is :

A) better graphics (potentially)

B) The back-story

I don't really care for A, and for B it's kind of scarce... I only need to save the world of kill the dragon so many times.

I did a 180 and learned chess which I feel wildly rewarding!

I'm also making a "slow game" (12 "action points" every like 12h, fantasy settings) that you can play for 5 minutes a day, but can be really immersive (it's text only).

I don't really know what I wanted to say here, but I too hope I'll find some new breathtaking game :-)

The only thing that makes it hard for me is shitty monetization, and the knowledge that all online games are subject to getting OW2'd

The older I get the more I know what kinda games I'm into. So everything else I try to play just feels boring very quickly. I get bored very quickly in general if I don't keep a game fresh for myself by, for example, mixing main and side quests instead of doing just one for hours.

I've also had times when I didn't play any video games at all and just watched YouTube all day. And sometimes I felt like I played games just because I didn't have anything better to do.

At the moment, I basically just play Cyberpunk and Battlebit, because both of those offer various ways of approaching encounters.

I have noticed it's been harder and harder to find something I want to play. I've gone down both my Steam library and my wishlist going "No...no...no...god no..."

A lot of my games that I thoroughly enjoyed in the past but I am done with. These include the entire Half Life franchise, Kerbal Space Program and I think Stardew Valley. Loved those games, played the hell out of them, will probably not launch them again.

A lot of games I've found diminishing replay value. Like I feel like I've mastered Subnautica, having done a number of self-imposed challenge runs like baseless vegetarian.

Talking about "story" makes me want to fuss about Tears of the Kingdom. This game doesn't have a story; it has an anecdote at best. It's amazing how far they stretched so little over absolutely nothing. They wrote so little plot for this game that they couldn't come up with four different cut scenes for the defeated the bosses sequences. It's a genuinely amazing piece of craftsmanship, the amount of hard work that went into the art and engineering that is that game is an astounding achievement but wow I don't like playing it, and I think, for the first time since I was 5 years old, I'm not going to buy the next Zelda game.

It's been awhile since I've come across something new that makes me think "yeah I want to play that."

Have you ever run out of Youtube to watch? Like there's just nothing you're interested in on there? It feels like that but bigger.

Come and goes for me, I try to play only one RPG or adventure type game at a time to remain hooked to the plot, several hours into Final Fantasy 8 on steam at the moment, played Xenogears on my steamdeck using emulation before it. I'm in my thirties for reference.

I'd be playing a lot less I suspect, if I didn't get into simracing. Nowadays it's that and a roguelike FPS for in-between.

This is how I am with books. I have Starters Anxiety

I feel like a lot of games these days make it difficult to get into, ironically by trying too hard to make it easy to get into, with excessive tutorialization. Part of it might also be the types of games that you like. For example, I want to play a game to have fun and challenge myself, not to sit around watching a story play out for a half hour while I walk around doing nothing. So the majority of popular games that people are always talking about are the kind of games that I would absolutely hate. I want to just jump in and play. The new Super Mario Wonder game is a pretty good example of something that just gets out of your way and lets you play the game, so I have been enjoying it quite a bit for the past few days. The recent F-zero 99 is also an enjoyable racing game for me, for the same reasons. I have also been getting into fighting games more in the past few years, so I've been playing Street Fighter 6 a lot.

So the most important thing I have learned, is that I can no longer just look at which games are considered "good", because in many cases I'm going to hate them. When I was younger, I would love just about any of the popular games. But now, I know what I like, and that's what I gravitate to.

(Almost) 40 year old gamer here. Eh... it depends of my mood and how "new" the game feels. But I find easier to settle in PvP-oriented games tho.

Tastes change. What are you in to now?

I've been through a bunch of life phases and gaming has basically been a part of all of them. Definitely, over time, the thrill of a new game is a bit more subdued than when you were a kid because you have done it so many times, and I'll admit, if a game doesn't immediately grab me, I probably will bounce off it. I have a ton of games that I still play from gen 2-6 if I need to feel nostalgic. But I realized that I have trouble committing to games that feel too samey as the most recent ones I've played. If I play a JRPG, I have to follow that up with a platformer, followed by an indie game, followed by a Sony 3rd person shooter. Fighting games are also great pallet cleansers. Sounds like you're depressed, and you should really spend time in nature and remember what and how you found joy in the past with gaming.

When you're young, you're often engaging in a common animal behavior known as "play". This is essentially practice-mode for life, where you physically or mentally act out a lot of the abstract ideas you've been learning about over the years. This is critical, because our abstract ways of understanding and communicating advanced concepts are still fundamentally incomplete. You can, for instance, teach a kid to be honest, that honesty is important, etc. But then they get into a school environment, surrounded by real life situations. Will honesty always benefit them, like a "good" thing is supposed to? No.

Our abstract understanding of honesty and its importance is one thing. Putting it into effective practice is another, and fundamentally circumstantial.

"Play" is how animals bridge these two things with personal experience, while hopefully avoiding the consequences of actually trying for real and potentially having an accident. Like, an animal could abstractly learn about hunting by observing its mother. But until it actually physically practices these skills, it will be very bad at them. Us learning about "the importance of honesty" is no different.

Humans have a vastly, exponentially greater number of abstracts we're required to understand in order to be effective citizens of the modern world. We tackle them in the same way, though, with play. Play, is practice.

So, if play is practice in an attempt to bridge some kind of abstract, incomplete learning, then what do you have to gain at this current phase of your life, from this "play"?

Your subconscious gets this. You don't need to play anymore, you're good enough for the real thing. So, why should your brain want to play at something? Especially when getting older also makes it clearer just how much incorrect information is being taught in gaming. Like, how many people try to use their CoD experiences to understand the Russo-Ukrainian War?

Anyways, it's complicated.

edit: Thinking further on this, I would propose the following: In the same way that horniness is the mechanism by which your genes make you reproduce them, and hunger is the mechanism it employs to make you fuel their work, "fun" is the mechanism by which your genes make you practice whatever skills or experiences might improve your chances of passing them on, in an environment where it is safer to do so.

This is why play gets fundamentally less fun as you get older. It begins to lose its purpose, outside of handing those skills, and the techniques for practicing them, on to the next generation. We prefer to go back to those same games we played though, because we're refining the lessons we learned from them. This has an evolutionary benefit as well, actually, as even our methods of "play" can be improved through long enough practice and iteration. These refined methods of play can then be handed down instead, which will likely be more efficient than previous iterations.

Make it an appointment. Get ready to play the game on Saturday at 09:30 and stick with it until 15:30 give it 6 hours of your full attention. No phone within reach. Make sure to get the housework done by that so you can stay longer. That worked wonders for me. Oh, and play older games. I never played xbox360 or PS3 games (only CoD couch coop with friends) because I had a Wii and only recently got an old PS3 and the games are amazing.

Well if you don't even want to install them... Its okay to just run a few quick matches and log off. You've gamed for a long time? Take it easy, its a marathon not a sprint.

I've seen comments making comparisons to old and new gaming industry. They don't do story as well any more. What I find is they don't do marketing the way that appeals to me anymore either. If I want to be excited about a game, I have to read about it slowly and find wallpapers and concept art. I have to lead myself to the water before I can drink. I hype myself up about it!

One really extreme example of this is Runescape special accounts where youtubers like never leave one area, or do hardcore ironman, or play on one square at a time or whatever. I can take one tenth of that energy and make my gaming more interesting.

I stopped buying games after I noticed I still only open my typical three :/
Also is a good way of saving money :)