LOL you’re not alone. I just don’t have time for games anymore and would rather play a boardgame than a videogame these days.
Sounds like burnout followed by reassessment of current goals and life conditions. This happens alot, especially amongst MMO’s but to be honest, hardcore games sometimes can take as much time out of you as MMO’s can over the long run anyhow.
Main thing here is to enjoy the time out. relax back into it when and if you want to later on and just learn to take things in moderation as it helps alot more in the long run. Also as Shieldwolf mentioned Boardgames make a great thing to cycle in on occassion as in general they provide much more social interactions then video games do, including the online aspect.
Additionally that said since I touched on it, you shouldn’t feel pressured to play any specific type of genre/category of games, to be honest it helps a lot to cycle amongst the many variates available as it does help a lot to alleviate burning out on an specific genre. So feel free to mix it up a lot, and as mentioned Boardgames are a GREAT thing to mix it up with!
Meeker
Its good to mix it up. I go through periods where I read, write or program and never play games, and other periods where I’d rather play games than any of them (and that 3 day stretch in 2004 where I took up jogging).
Sometimes you feel like a game. Sometimes you don’t.
Mixing it up is always good.
Additionally getting away from it all occassionally is actually a blessing as it gives you time to reflect on what you’ve played and why you want to play more.
RepoMan, clearly it’s time for you to branch out into obscure Japanese roleplaying games:
[edit]Damn it, beaten to the punch!
It happens to me too RepoMan, it’s usually for a certain time and then I go back to a game genre or games in general, it’s a periodical thing for me. It’s just that it can be easy to forget some state of mind or emotion, and hard to remember them by sheer will, which doesn’t mean you dislike whatever brought them. You mix it up with other activities, or find a new game, and those emotions are triggered back into your mind of their own accord. Humans have various interests and they can’t all be active at the same time.
In the beginning of last year I was pretty much in that same state, then BFBC2 came out and 200 hours of play later I’m still enjoying it.
Best thing is not to over-think it, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything fundamental. Next thing you know, you’ll be playing The Witcher 2 or something. Reading books can never be bad, so if you have time for that go for it.
I’ll re-quote the now immortal words of Warning:
Hmm, if I have your age pegged right, I’m thinking male menopause.
But seriously… It’s probably a cyclical thing right now. Could be outside stresses, could just be you’ve exhausted the freshness and need to do something different for a while.
I’m in a serious game “up” phase right now. I’m really finding most TV pointless and frustrating to watch when I could be gaming. Gaming’s pointless too for the most part, but at least there are more original stories there, and I’m ddoing something as far as decision-making/puzzle-solving. Games, books, and reading news on the iPad are rocking my world right now… Most TV, I’m feeling the way you are about hardcore games.
When life becomes a grind, which long work hours, kids, etc, can cause, my patience for grind in games goes way down. What might have been fun grinding 2 months ago now feels like annoying grind.
It cycles, but I do find as I age my willingness to deal with game grind has dropped quite a bit. Thus, like you, I’ll find myself dinking around with low commitment games more than playing anything hard core.
Don’t be silly, it’s lupus.
As the people I have to work with in our HQ get dumber day by day I started playing a lot of brain-teasing games (puzzle, Hidden Objects).
My brain needs a decent workout and as this is happening less and less at work (delayed projects, spending days because of bad communication / bad English from my counterparts) I seem to have to “feed it” in my free time.
Maybe the same happened to you?
Some days I spend my evening playing (Word) puzzle games on my iPod Touch and leave my PC turned off although I have a backlog of hardcore games that probably will last until my retirement…
Get rid of your backlog.
No, seriously. Trade it in on Amazon. Sell it on ebay. Give it away. Put it out with bulk trash. Burn it with pictures of various ex-girlfriends. Just get rid of it.
Backlogs are gamemotional baggage. I’ll tell you straight up that you’re never going to play Assassin’s Creed 2 or Batman: Arkham Asylum again. Civ4? Maybe. Bioshock 2? You can blow through it in a day or two and the game stays high-tempo, so there’s hope there.
My general rule of thumb is that if a game has sat on my shelf for about two months unplayed, it goes into the sell pile. If it’s PC, and I can’t sell it, it gets uninstalled. If it’s on Steam, I sort Steam by installed games only.
There are some exceptions (typically timeless stuff like Civ4 or Diablo 2, where a mood will suddenly strike you and you’ll be obsessed for a week or two), or games I want to keep just to have because I thought they were neat or would be very hard to find again.
Don’t keep a backlog. It paralyzes you. Play a game to satisfaction and put it on display or sell/trade it off. These things are like books. If you read a quarter of, I dunno, The Great Gatsby, then don’t bother touching it for two months, chances are you’ll never get back to it – and even if you do, you’ll probably need to start over.
It’s hard to drop $50-60 on a game and have to admit that you’re done with it, especially when you haven’t finished it. But it’s a necessary part of gaming’s death-rebirth cycle.
I agree 100%. I’ve gone through a few of these cycles in my 20+ years of gaming (god I’m an old fart?).
In every case I do eventually get back into gaming, no matter how long the delay was but it is never with the pile of games I left. It’s always because something new and sparkly catches my eye.
I went through a big shift in my gaming habits about three years ago, and it was odd. I’ve always been a big rpg/strategy (turn-based) gamer, but about three years ago suddenly I got into shorter, more action-based fare as my primary gaming. It started with Portal, actually. Then, I finally settled in and played through Half-Life 2. After that, I’ve been on a big action-shooter kick ever since, and particularly have fallen in love with playing competitive FPS games. I really don’t know what suddenly shifted my gaming tastes, but there it is.
I still love and play rpg’s a lot too, especially the great games that have been coming out on the DS in recent years (the remakes of the Dragon Quest games in particular), and have had a blast with a lot of indie titles. But for some reason I’m just a sucker for the Call of Duty and Battlefield games these days.
Enh, I’m not feeling paralyzed by my backlog at all, more just uninterested. But I actually feel fond of it. It’s not the games’ fault that I’m not there right now. It’s me. Honestly.
Shit, I really do feel this way – poor little Arkham Asylum, how could I kick it to the curb??? CRAZY IN THE HEAD BONE, ME!
Thanks very much to everyone for all the sanity checks – it is genuinely helpful to hear so many others in similar boats. Makes me know ain’t nothing wrong really at all. Thass why Qt3 be ossum – you can geek out about shit or spill your guts and people actually can handle either or both in arbitrary combination. sniff I LURVES YOU ALLS
And I am delighted to say that yesterday I got confirmation that my work crunch paid off BIGTIME – I nailed my performance goals (both CPU-wise, and job-wise), and I am feeling fucking excellent. And my wife and I rocked Castle Ravenloft last night, so that too is excellent. Yay life!!!
“Be all zen and shit” is definitely the prescription going forwards. That, and more workouts. Hardcore gaming will come around again when it does like it does if it does. Saul Goodman.
Oh yeah! Another reason I won’t get rid of my backlog is that periodically I really do get back to something. For example, I put down the first Professor Layton game for something like two years. Then I took it on a plane trip with the fam, and on the way back it got its hooks into me megastyle and I burned through it. Or Supreme Commander 2 – I bought it and dinked with it a little, set it aside for several months, and then the economy patch came out and it took over my life for four weeks straight.
Hell, right now our LCD projector is slowly dying of Blue Wash Disease, but sometime in the next year or so I expect we will get a new projector (maybe one of these, drooool), and I am going to try to get the hacking out of my system a lot before then, because once the screen isn’t all bluey anymore I will probably drag ol’ Batman back out for some serious arse-kickings.
Had that recommended by someone else as well. Thanks Anax, I’ll definitely check it out.
Three years ago on the books forum here I took up a 52 books in 52 weeks challenge. I read a few less, like 48 or something. Now I have a bookcase FULL of books, spend time in the used book store, do my social networking on goodreads and have returned to school.
I do still play games some, I went a little crazy in the steam sale and have a big stack of “to play” games on my dresser. I don’t visit you awesome people on Q23 as often anymore.
I blame it partially on existential crisis, would I rather have a big stack of high Civ scores stored on my computer or a couple of published papers when the grim reaper comes? Partially on age, my kids are old enough to game now and I now see that I would never let them play for the many hours that I did. Partially it’s the fact that I’ve always had these other interests like a love of literature and economics that weren’t getting fulfilled with games.
If your crisis about not wanting to do the stuff you used to do isn’t depression welcome it and see what else life has to offer.
Thanks for starting this thread, repoman, because I thought about writing this experience myself. In my case the explanation is quite easy: I’ve got a job, that I extremely identify with and which is very gratifying, but which is also very demanding in regards of social contact. So in my spare time I don’t want to play games anymore, that are too demanding, meaning they take a lot of time or energy (like planning and identifying with the characters). For example (and I know this may sound stupid): I bought Dragon Age during the Steam holiday sale. I started it, liked it, then came the first decision between helping a friend or not. I stopped playing and… well, that was over a month ago. Maybe if you have to make decisions all day, you don’t want to be forced to make them in your spare time. Does that make sense?
I nearly completely switched to DS games, but everything else takes too long or I rather pick up a book or watch an episode of Dr Who. I like how I can just shut the DS without losing the game and how most of the games are a bit lighter in mood. Even Chronotrigger is playable in small chunks.
Yes, thanks to Repo for bringing this to light and to Dan for shedding more light upon it.
I too have been suffering from something along these lines lately. Since before Thanksgiving I’ve been working 6 day weeks and long work days practically non-stop. I’ve been rolling out new hardware and software to the entire organization myself basically, as we have no other skilled IT folks and no money to hire temps. Anyway, it pretty much ruined the holiday season for me, and there have been other aspects of my personal life that haven’t put me in the brightest mood the past few months as well. All told, it’s taken a huge bite out of my “will to game” so to speak.
I thought the feeling would pass when I finished building my new gaming rig last month. Unfortunately, it did not, and now I have a new system and a pile of games that will look and run great on it, and no desire to install or play any of them. What little time I’ve spent gaming I have spent with games like Puzzle Quest Warlords and Hegemony : Philip of Macedon, games I can throw 30 minutes at and not care if I get anywhere. Many nights I simply don’t play at all anymore.
I thought I was really depressed or starting to have a breakdown or something. Hell, I turned 40 last year, so I thought I was probably having some kind of introductory mid-life crisis or something. But reading the comments here, and recognizing a lot of what I’m feeling in Dave’s post about depression, makes me realize that I’m just overworked, tired and stressed out, which in turn has led to a mild depression. It will pass, and when it does I will game again (as lame as that sounds). ;-) Hell, if work lets up in the next few weeks, I may just schedule myself a mental health Friday and fire up Dragon Age Origins, Bioshock 2, Darksiders or one of the other backlog games that would show off my new rig nicely. Nothing like 8 straight hours of gaming to put you back on the horse…
Anyway, thanks all for making me realize it’s temporary. While I wait around for things to get better, at least I have Netflix Watch Instantly now. Spartacus and Torchwood are just the thing when I’m so burned out from work that all I can do at 9pm is sit on the couch and stare at a TV screen.