Lately I find myself unable (or not motivated) to keep going in many videogames, such as (but not limited to) Nier, Psychonauts 1 & 2, Panzer Dragoon Saga, now Final Fantasy 7 Remake. Even with Nier Automata, before those, I had to struggle to keep my interest on.
They are all good, but I feel no motivation, like being put on rails and decide if I should play them or just get off those rails, if it makes sense… the last two games I played with real enthusiasm were Elden Ring and Live-a-Live.
Is there something wrong with Final Fantasy 7R, for example? I don’t understand if, apart from being a very well crafted game, in the end it is just a “well made game” and I have played enough well made games, or if I am feeling fatigue. It makes me somehow displeased because I was looking to play those games, but then I feel no motivation after having tasted them for a bit… I don’t have many videogaming friends, so I wanted to share this feeling here to understand better why this is happening
I think everyone goes through this especially when you feel the pressure to play routinely. If you’ve played a lot you tend to connect things together a lot more and see everything as a variation of a convention. I think the best advice is to either play something radically outside your wheelhouse or just take a break from playing until the urge returns. Try a new hobby or put some points into a skill you want to improve at.
I find writing about each game helps make it more of an active task of analysis which is itself rewarding since I hope to improve my writing through it. Have definitely had this fatigue many times before though.
everything is wrong with that game
i do this a lot even with games i like and would like to play more of but idk, i feel like it’s easy to forget how much work videogames are and how little of what you do in them is generative of any particular idea or sensation - constantly repositioning the camera, continuous movement from point to point even when none of the individual points are very distinguishable from each other, managing bits and bobs, other things that are maybe exciting <10% of the time… filling out a possibility space or sensibility space whose contours you already kind of get… i get that boredom is the material games are made from and the well from which their most beautiful effects are drawn but with so many games just offering variations of the same KIND of boredom it does get harder not to see all these games as just variations of the one game, the one continuous videogame experience that you just dip in and out of and which will never be “finished” no matter how far you get in any one particular title
I have barely played any video games for the past year, maybe 1.5 to 2 years (which is partly why I haven’t really been following discussions here as much as I used to). I put a lot of hours into KOF15 early last year, then 100 hours into Elden Ring, and I think that was about it until I started messing around with SF6 recently (and even that is lighter time spent than I expected to).
I think a lot of it could be just thinking whether what you’re playing is actually worth your time. I know last year I was looking at a lot of the more visible upcoming games and thinking I had a pretty good idea what to expect from most of them and whether I’d enjoy them or not, and none of it looked noticeably more interesting experiences to me than I already had access to. Nor at the time did I feel like putting in the effort to explore the wide indie world under the surface.
So I just decided to pursue different interests instead. Video games take up so much time! There are so many other things in life you could do instead! That’s not to say video games aren’t worth the time, but after spending so much time on video games I decided I wanted to spend more time on other things too.
It turns out the board game world is as insufferable as the video game world, though.
Between Elden Ring and Tears of the Kingdom, I mostly bounced off every big game I tried to sit down and play. Nothing was grabbing me. Everything seemed like too much of a hassle. They weren’t bad, they just weren’t compelling enough to me in the moment to be worth the time and effort they asked.
I did play and enjoy a handful of hour-or-less-long itch games in that time, and I also got really into both Dicey Dungeons (relatively short “runs”, not making “progress” through a “story” like other games—managed to put 75 hours into it when no game that “takes” 75 hours could keep my attention) and a replay of Persona 3 (an old favorite).
Mostly, though, I decided to read, watch movies, and work on making games in the one to three hours I often allot at the end of the night for leisure whatevers.
For whatever it’s worth, this sort of burnout happened to me a few years back when playing Final Fantasy XV, and when I went back to it like a year and a half later, I got really into it, so it may not be the games you’re playing per se—it may indeed be that you’re just burned out on “big games” and need a moment away to do something else.
i do feel that these days i’m either drilling into one game for ages like ffxiv or totk, and telling myself it beats scrolling, or not really playing anything. it’s certainly more REWARDING to be playing funny little indie-type games or watching films or trying to make stuff or whatever but like … i’m tired and that’s all a lot of mental effort lol
my entire vidcon diet is now effectively co-op sessions or pretty gentle grinding preparing for co-op sessions, i surely do struggle to be arsed with single player runs on anything else except elden ring last year apparently
i’m not entirely convinced this is compromising my media literacy yet
I definetly hit some kind of slump around the time Monster Hunter Iceborne dropped. It felt like the only thing I was doing was feeling out frame data and hitbox data and just machine braining my way through. Fighting game were the only thing where I felt any real brain work happening. I still felt like I was machine braining while playing Elden Ring but it was at least enough of an open playground where I felt like I could enjoy my personal narrative of the journey. TotK was probably the most I felt stimulated enough to play a single player video game again due to it’s breadth of player expression with building. (I still think the shrine puzzles felt easier or i felt less stuck in them than I did in some of BotW’s shrines.)
I’ll wait till a PC release but I’m kind of eager to play FFXVI more for the button feel and presentation. I can’t help but see it as a weird mash up of DMC functions with CC2 trappings. (The cinematic giant fights, scrolling shooter events and QTE gimmicks just feel like what CC2 wanted to achieve with Asura’s Wrath and the cinematic events in their Naruto games but with presentation and design resources to feel “right”).
But this slump has also led to me pursuing other past times like crochet, sewing, hiking etc a little more so whos to say its a bad thing.
i didn’t have the energy for system shock and the only other thing i’ve played in the last month was destiny for the new dungeon two weeks ago
watching totk gave me what i needed from it vicariously
i just don’t have the itch to learn an action game from scratch and if i want to play one i’ll dip in to the one i have relative mastery of with a dozen API tools to obviate the boring parts
books, movies, tv, and VNs have the other parts of games i like without the labors of an inventory and body etc etc. i see the attaché case in re4 and i’m out
Yep. Been depression-playing EDF 2017 lately. Just mindless videogame grind distilled down to its most basic form. In some ways it feels like the most honest type of video game.
This sure is a post.
Finding games I enjoy playing repeatedly has become my gaming meta-game. It can be tough! Especially when there’s a game that is stimulating for a while, but then goes stale for whatever reason–and I start to think it’s something wrong with me rather than oh right I should either figure out a more enjoyable way to play this–if there’s a different mode or difficulty setting, for instance–or let it alone for a while until I actually get the urge to play it again.
So now I keep priority lists. ^ _^ There’s a bit of sub-categorization by genre in the upper tiers but in general they go something like
- games I’m really enjoying
- games I enjoy once in a while, but that get old if I play them too frequently
- games I might possibly want to play if I’m in a particular mood
- other games I COULD play if I’m not feeling any of the above
- games I could play but probably won’t want to
- games that are definitely out of the rotation ; )
games these days are designed so that the only way you stop playing them is through fatigue/burning out, and i think that has knock-off effects on how we (the general populace) plays games that have normal endings too. we’re being conditioned to give up playing a game when it starts to lose us because that’s when the churn cycle starts in this blasted service-game landscape we live in. this is on top of what catamites points out in that so many games are just rote application of existing paradigms.
i think what helps me to stick with a game is to have a specific goal in mind and chase it, putting in regular time until it’s finished. for example, my grind to beat all of Tiberian Dawn on hard. that helps keep me focused. but, tbh, it only works sometimes, and it’s a double-edges sword bc if the goal isn’t 100%ing the game you run the risk of finishing it and not wanting to do anything else lol.
idk the answer, but i agree with everyone saying diversify your interests and move on to other stuff if games is wearing you down.
one thing that will always be attractive, almost regardless of format/genre, is novel and confident character design
it is incredibly rare
over the past couple years i’ve completely lost all desire to stay current with pop culture in general whereas before i might try to catch a few wide-release movies a year if people i knew said they were like, reasonably diverting…
a good example would be everyone everywhere all at once. some people thought it was really good and some people thought it was really bad, lots of ppl probably thought it was mid too. at first i thought i should watch it if only to see where amongst those categories i fell… then i guess i realized it just didnt fucking matter what i thought of it at all and i’d honestly rather just watch basically any of michelle yeoh’s hong kong films instead
doesnt smth like this seem interesting???
i guess my point is that it’s better to just ignore things that don’t interest you personally because negative attention is still attention, life is short, and hard disc space is limited. people are under no obligation to even acknowledge the existence of a movie no matter how popular it is…
it’s fine to stop playing a game if it isnt holding your attention, and it’s fine to never give a final fantasy game consideration, and i say that as someone who has maintained a low level of what is bordering on obsession with the series for something like literally 20 years [i would like to get a tonberry tattoo i think they are way too cute]. i never played ffxiv cause i just dont have an interest in mmorpgs even tho every other homosexual person with a desktop computer or playstation 4 that ive met could tell me all about it. im sure its great! it’s just not the kind of thing that interests me personally
it’s not always easy to ignore the existence of pop culture when it felt like every single person i met irl was obsessed with game of thrones or whatever for literally something like 10 straight years… but everyone forgot it existed as soon as it went off the air. so i just try to remember that virtually every pop cultural phenomenon is a bubble whose existence will be forgotten five minutes after it pops
i think a lot of people do have a compulsion to keep up with things like upcoming game releases or currently airing tv shows or new albums coming out and i just don’t think there’s any value in doing those things. if anything there seems to be a lot of value in not staying all that current especially when it comes to things like big console game releases or wide-release movies. like enough people in the world have experienced those things to the point where it basically doesnt even matter if i do or don’t watch like fast x or whatever
On this forum some people play games every day, others make jokes about how they post on a videogame forum but hardly ever play any videogames, still others play only certain genres or one single game a year. We all intuitively know why that is, but I feel like videogame discourse doesn’t yet have the language to fully articulate why. Given how much time and energy videogames can easily expand to take up in one’s life, I feel they need such a language more than previous artforms.
We say “I’ve played enough of this kind of thing before” or “I’m too busy with work/family” or “right now I prefer to [relax/challenge myself]” but I feel those kinds of answers tend to beg a deeper question. What were we searching for in videogames in the first place and is it that we no longer need it, that we found it already, or that we lost hope of finding it?
I’ve been each of those people at various times. I think people are more… phase-based than we like to give ourselves credit for, due to essentialist epistemology errors that boil down to things like “identity” and “the real me”. For myself I find these phases are usually like 1-3 years long. It’s less important to analyze why our phases change and more important to be willing to recognize in ourselves when they are changing and adapt accordingly.
i’ve been feeling this way lately about Tears of the Kingdom. some of my close gaming friends sunk hours into stuff like Elden Ring or this new Final Fantasy, which doesn’t appeal to me at all anymore, and i was excited when this new Zelda came out that I could keep up and talk about progress together but i’ve just not been able to feel any strong motivation going through it, even though i think it’s fun.
i could chalk it up to being in the middle of a lot of other personal life changes recently and not feeling as into sitting down and playing but the last time i was this busy before i was playing Persona 5 for the first time and got obsessed, even though there’s so much going on and it’s not even a typical game i like to play. i found the time to get though that game, and even when i have time to get through this Zelda, i find myself wanting to just watch a movie instead. so i guess it just comes in peaks and valleys.
it has been, however, a good game in a genre that i call “podcast games” where i can plug away at it, with the sound off and listening to something like a audio book or music instead. it’s become the normal level of engagement for any game that has open world elements and a “chore checklist” mindset. it’s my attention span broken in half, not really engaging with two different mediums at the same time.
In my personal experience, I find this to be extremely true. This time last year, I was watching two movies a day in an attempt to see as much from as many different times and places as possible. Now I’m playing PC Engine games and spinning that off into a half dozen separate obsessions and compulsions.
i went through several periods of burnout and still haven’t played much outside of OMORI for a long time at this rate. i basically remedy this by watching my partner play things or just collecting more and more games on sale when i get a chance. i don’t really have a sense of dread when it comes to my backlog because i know that eventually, i WILL buckle down and have so many cool games to play through.
even if i don’t play them all, i know that if i ever have kids, i can just pass my library onto them through family sharing or whatever. i also think the advice of branches out into different genres and types of games def helps. i still collect rpgs and visual novels and may start them sometimes, but i recently started getting into strategy type things or just something that would actually be more challenging like dark souls ( on my wishlist but not owned yet ).
i think it’s important when you’re burned out to just do what everyone else has said and just move on to other hobbies until you feel like you wanna play again. what you’re going through is perfectly normal and there’s nothing wrong with you! <3