The thought of skipping games like Portal or Quadrilateral Cowboy or Brothers or Gorogoa or Proteus or Little Inferno or SOMA… Eeek!
Oh man!
So I tend to oscillate between a long-ass game and then a bunch of shorter games (played one at a time) to cleanse the palate. I usually have the odd async turn-based multiplayer game on the go too (Antihero, Chaos Reborn, currently Through The Ages) along with a twitchier immediate MP game like Splatoon, Overcooked, Vermintide etc.
Longer games usually wear me down because I’m very sensitive to doing the same things over and over again (outside of competition). The longer a game is the less likely it’s going to be able to sustain my interest before it turns into a slog so I worry about all these ‘mega games’ that people recommend so highly! This is why I’m such a fan of shorter games because they’re often so much more focused and respectful of my time, and just as gratifying, if not more so. I mean, that list above is solid gold.
Right now I’m on a short games blast and they energise me so much more than being confined to one long experience so it’s a pretty good cycle for me. I’m currently playing Hellblade which is very interesting and atmospheric; before that Quadrilateral Cowboy (holy cow), before that The Norwood Suite (wow and whoa). All inside the space of 30 hours. Boom. Lots more lined up too…
Funny, what you describe is exactly how I do books. Typically one fiction, one non fiction concurrent. Will finish a long book, then cut it with either a Pratchett or Phillip K Dick short stories or something.
This is what I do. The moment a game starts to feel like a job or tedious, I move away from it for quite a while until my enthusiasm for it builds back up.
I can relate to that, I definitely will lose interest if a game gets repetitive, or at least feels repetitive to me.
Edit: whoops, hit save too soon. Anyway, I find Rockstar games get this right, there’s a ton of variety builtni to them where it doesn’t feel grindy in the way a Ubisoft game might.
Having thought about this a bit more, I think that one of the reasons for this is that I like a challenge and gameplay depth. Short games are almost never challenging in more than a gimmicky way and simply do not have the time to develop some actual depth to master/systems to understand.
So by the point you played some 12-hour game for 6 hours, you have seen it all already and know that nothing more will come, in many cases. That significantly lowers the chance that I pick up a game again. Of course, not all short games follow that scheme, but truly many do.
Meanwhile, you got games like Dark Souls, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, EU4 and more that you can play for dozens of hours and which will always have a new challenge or system for you around the corner.
On the other hand there are games like SOMA or other walking simulators, which of course do not have a single challenge at all, but I still finish them usually. To me, those aren’t really games, instead more like interactive movies.
Movies aren’t challenging (well, usually), but sometimes you just like to be told a story.
I also don’t like grind, though, so if it becomes obvious that a game tries to drag it’s length by grinding some easy challenge stuff, I’m also usually out. That certainly has something to do with growing older, valuing your time more.
Grind can have some relaxing attributes, but if that just doesn’t work for you, I don’t see why you’d waste your time like that.
I’m another guy with what I call “gaming ADD”. I rarely play a single game for more than 30 minutes at a time, andit’s rarer still that a game can hold my interest for more than a week or two. I’ll often go back to an older game when something interesting like a new update or piece of DLC drops (hello again, Stellaris), but I’ll drop it again a couple of weeks later.
what’s funny is how quickly I become disinterested. I could be p[laying something one night and thinking how great it is and the next morning be like “Nah, let’s see hwat’s new on Steam”.
That’s why I stopped writing AAR’s. The obligation to keep playing feels more like work. It’s also why I’ve drifted to digital board games, which can be played to completion in an hour or 2.
