Maybe this doesn’t need to be said but this is a different question to which video game genres do you enjoy. For example, I enjoy playing Dota 2. Every few months or so, I’ll play it for a couple of weeks and put it back down. I’ll never play more than two or three matches and I feel ‘present’ for the duration.
Paradox grand strategy games (especially EUIV), however, I can start playing at 7am and in a blink of an eye it can be 11pm and I won’t have eaten or used the toilet or anything. I can do this for multiple days in a row. Furthermore, I don’t often feel like I’m ‘enjoying’ it. I’m just consumed by it.
I’m intrigued to hear whether or not anyone recognises this difference in themselves. If you have any insight as to why you’re consumed by some games and not others, I’d be very interested.
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I got absolutely consumed by Dead cells. I put more hours into it in a few months than I did a game I’ve been playing with a friend for 5 years at the time. There’s another game in the same Genre that I can’t rember the name of, but the high skill, PVE games like those if they catch my eye, oof, I go HARD.
Samurai Gunn
For me, it’s Fallout, Elder Scrolls, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy, Hearthstone and Stardew Valley.
But pretty much anything like those will do it if I’m enjoying myself.
With TES, Fallout and Stardew, I’ve definitely had something approaching hyperfocus. Not as severe as my PDS hyperfocus. Never with MMOs though. I’ve played a decent amount of a few but could never play more than one or two hours per day.
In WoW, I was a solo player that wanted to do everything. So, I’d go to a town, grab all the quests, and start crossing them off until it was time to go to the next one. And in between, I just spend hours wandering around looking for flowers to pick or ore to mine.
4X games, specifically any of the Civilization games I’ve played (everything but SMAC & Civ: Beyond Earth).
MMORPG, specifically Elder Scrolls Online.
Have you ever tried a Paradox Grand Strategy game?
I have not tried any of their games, actually.
Rogue-likes, especially if each run is long. Man, the number of times I booted up One Way Heroics for “just a quick run” and realize hours later that I should’ve gone to bed long ago.
I can barely put down Ace Attorney style games. I love experiences where I get to unravel a mystery.
It’s also really easy to spend a long time grinding in old school Maple. Just monotonous enough to be soothing, just active enough to keep my attention on it.
High speed first person shooters like Titanfall 2 or the finals; the complete opposite, meticulous, and slow shooters like Rainbow 6: Siege
Quick and twitchy FPS games. Reason I was so upset when roblox ditched wine support is because it deprived me of my daily dose of randomizer and bad business.
Factorio. At one point I binged so much that I started seeing conveyor belts in my sleep.
Ah, the Tetris effect
Rhythm games. Diablo clones. ATS, ETS, and BeamNG.drive.
Personal fave Diablo clone?
Last Epoch. It’s new and very fun.
Minecraft, if I’ve got a project to do.
I run a local server so that I can play with my kid, but I’m the one who has to actually get things done. Simple things like looking for diamonds is enough to keep me playing for hours. I’ll find a vein, and I think that’s not enough, I need to find more, so I’ll find half a dozen more veins, but then my brain switches to the ‘I may as well carry on’ mindset.
I mined a mountain down to ground level recently because the top was spoiling the view from our village, and once I started, it was quite soothing.
Anything that has set turns or levels with natural points to pause. The short time commitment make it easier to “one more turn” my way into playing for hours.
XCOM 2 is phenomenal for this.
Every time I’ve tried to play XCOM EW or XCOM 2 I’m having a great fun time, and then it seems a new Alien type drops which just wrecks my shit out of nowhere and I get so angry that I quit and don’t come back.
If I were good at video games, they’d have no doubt ruined me as PDS games have.
Management games where I can play really slowly and focus on small details, normally on very hard mode too so a lot of the easy ones don’t make the cut.
Football Manager and Software Inc are probably the ones I go back to most often.
Also 99% of the games I play I never complete…
Any Paradox game. Oxygen Not Included. Factorio. Civilization. Rimworld. Dwarf Fortress. The list goes on.
For me I think it’s about having non-stop and parallel mini problems/puzzles/goals. By the time one task is finished. There’s two more to take its place.
An observation inspired by your comment. I love video game narratives; I often hate video game storytelling. PDS games tell me stories but there’s no cutscenes or stop in gameplay and the narratives are all dynamic.
I imagine Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress could be very dangerous for me.
Dwarf Fortress is, imo, much less crack-y than something like Factorio. It takes much less constant attention by how slow the game moves and how long your plans take to work out. I find my time in DF to be meditative and relaxing because I’m working towards a clear goal but can relax a lot of my reactions… Factorio is a game where you can do as fast as you can think (outside the early game) - even if you’re waiting on something there is always something else to obsess over.
Especially factorio with mods. I play with bob and angels mod which massively increases the complexity. I use infinite ore as well because anything on a timeline stresses me. I have over 2000 hrs in it.
I absolutely adored seablock… and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who has any social obligations in the next half a year.
This is definitely important in making the very most engaging base-builders - a pleasing mixture of longer term goals (manufacture this piece that I can eventually put in a future science pack or whatnot) and under-performing pieces of your older infrastructure that you have to scale up or re-plan is just so helpful for getting you into that flow state.
Games where the purpose is to optimize productivity, efficiency, and achieving accomplishments improve effectiveness. Or complex/realistic simulation games. So games like SimCity, Tropico, Kerbal Space Program, and MS Flight Simulator 2020.
It’s just too rewardingggg 🫨
