I’m embarrassed by the number of award-winning games I have unfinished on my hard drive, but every time I fire them up I think “i’m not enjoying this”.
Am I doing it wrong? Should I be mainlining my ADHD meds before trying to play?
where do i go
It’s a little too good at evoking a sense of loneliness and despair
Nah I love that shit tbh. Literary sadness isn’t common enough in games, pump that shit right into my bloodstream.
I would just find a different hobby tbh. I used to be like you with an ever-expanding backlog and constantly getting this weird anxiety over starting a game but not finishing it and forcing myself to finish a game I don’t actually like as some bizarre attempt at enforcing self-discipline on myself.
Then I found better hobbies and looking back, it was just me torturing myself doing something I don’t actually enjoy. I bet that if you just drop gaming as a hobby right now and pick a different hobby that you actually love, within 5 years, you’ll wonder why you even bother stressing over the backlog before unceremoniously deleting all those unfinished and unplayed games from your drive.
May I ask what’s the new hobby you’re enjoying?
I’ve tried so many hobbies the past decade but non of them stick. Everytime, I get obsessed right away, make great progress and learning super fast, invest in more equipments, just to completely lose interest couple months later.
(To name a few: paper crafts, pottery, crossstitch, DIY electronics and gadgets, violin, piano, guitar, ukulele, biking, hiking, VR, even gym and exercises)
And everytime in between I went back to gaming and collecting backlogs in Steam Sale.
Right now, it’s raising bugs. And I don’t mean the hobbyist way of buying cool bugs from a pet store and raising them in some plastic container. It’s the half-assed way of getting grabbing random bugs I see from my yard and raising them in those plastic soup containers and plastic food trays. I’ve raised mosquitos (I found mosquito eggs one day, dumped the eggs in some empty peanuts container, and watched the magic happen), midge flies, a whole bunch of different moths, some sawfly, and a bunch of hover flies. I found a parasitized caterpillar and watched the wasps emerge from their cocoons (along with a bonus fly that appeared out of nowhere).
It’s just fascinating to me as someone with no zoologist background. There’s so many time where I go “well, I didn’t expect that.” Stuff like how some caterpillars are cannibals or how there’s apparently a type of maggot that will tunnel into a moth pupa, feast upon the pupa from within, pupate within the now empty moth pupa, and emerge from the two pupas as a generic-looking fly. And it’s not like a parasitoid fly since all the parasitoid flies I’ve searched for online were smaller than the caterpillar when this fly is just a generic fly. I remembered being so confused when the sawfly emerged because sawfly larva look and act like caterpillars. I expected a moth and got some wasplike insect instead.
If you don’t want to be weird like me, there’s always gardening. You’ll encounter the bugs that way as well.
Do you have a vermicomposter yet? They sell fairly cheap ones that go in the kitchen. No smell, breaks down a kilo or so of food waste per week into plant fertiliser, and it’s such a neat little ecosystem. I stocked mine with two species of worms and all the pillbugs I could find.
I actually got a vermicomposter set up, but by “vermicomposter” I just mean one of those clean soup containers with worms in them. I mostly feed the worms decomposed leaves/twigs and banana peels. I don’t know how to easily harvest their castings outside of putting their food at the bottom of the containers, but to do that, I have to dump everything into a temp soup container, put the food at the bottom and dump the contents from the temp soup container back to the original soup container. I’m thinking about cutting the bottom of two soup containers and assembling them together so I basically have a soup container with two openings, one where I can put their food and one where they deposit their castings.
But yes, it’s cool to see him wiggle around and how there’s very discrete layers with castings at the top, food in the middle, stuff that they won’t eat like grains of sand below that, and water at the very bottom.
Excellent metaposting
All my hobbies only last a couple months before I lose interest. That’s why gaming is good, though; I can usually satisfy my need for change by picking a different game
You shouldn’t force it. It might just not be your cup of tea.
I love the story aspects but I hate a lot of the actual gameplay aspects. The time spent on running around the map everywhere, gathering resources, etc.
This should’ve been a visual novel tbh
should’ve been a visual novel
A visual novel with more text than the entire wheel of fire series with more internal monologue in any one scene than an entire Ayn Rand novel.
Teleport mod?
Disco Elysium took me three tries over three years to finish. I always knew I liked it, but I had to find the right moment in time for it to grip me. The music, the vibe, the art… But soo much reading.
Same with Dark Souls, same with Outer Wilds. All three are now among my favourite games of all time.
If it’s not for you, it’s perfectly fine. But some pieces of art are good because they are not the instant dopamine delivery method. I played vampire survivors for like 6 hours straight and never touched it again. I’ll always think about Harry and Kim.
And yes, if you have ADHD, give it a try medicated. We always chase the dopamine and that sometimes blinds us to slower paced, more rewarding joy.
I think this is largely a trap to think of this way. Just because a game is award winning doesn’t mean you will or have to like it.
For example I think breath of the wild is on its best days a 6/10; but rating things on a scale is also, IMO, meaninglessness without context as to why someone feels that way.
Example aside, the thing to realize is you don’t have to play any game you aren’t into. I recently played Disco Elysium and loved it. I think one of the reasons was I happened to be in the right headspace for that game. Its a very unique experience and I hesitate to recommend it to anyone in spite of my enjoyment.
Games are meant to be fun. If youre not enjoying one, move on. You can always come back to one some other time. It took me a long time fighting the sunk cost fallacy, convincing myself, “I’ve come this far, I should see how it ends”.
TLDR life is short, time spent gaming should be gaming on things you enjoy. Don’t let any reviews or hot takes force you into playing something that doesn’t jive with you.
I keep getting “game over” like 30 minutes in
There is no shame in making use of f5 and f7. What build are you using and does it align with the way you want to interact with the game? If you’re losing health off physical checks, as an example, go for a more physical build or don’t dump stat it and wait until you have the right items.
Oh, and get the can bag asap so you’ll have money for restore items. Those can save you. In case you didn’t know, you can have one health or morale, fail the check, and use the restore item before hitting continue to survive.
In term of media, what one like and what is good are 2 entirely different things and we should stop pretending that they are the same.
It’s fine to not like objectively good media, it’s also fine to like objectively bad media. You just need to acknowledge that as a human your tastes are subjective, and to recognize that a media can be bad even when you like it and that a media can be good even when you don’t like it.
I definitely find games more enjoyable on my ADHD meds. Especially games with a lot of reading like discord Elysium. No shame in needing a bit of help to stay focused and engaged with some text.
Sometimes you just need a little boost to get going and then it’s smooth sailing too.
I do think the meds would help, but I’m often taking a med vacation when I’m thinking of playing games
Fair. Yeah I say this, but I end up just playing through games and skipping half the text and hoping it wasn’t important. I’ve had to play a lot of YouTube videos to catch up on lore in my time.
There’s no real point trying to finish a game you don’t like, that’s just how it be sometimes. For me i knew I’d enjoy the game from the first sequence of waking up and dying trying to grab the tie.
I have a hard rule that if I’m not having fun before the refund period ends i just refund. I don’t like the “oh but it gets good at hour 3000” kinda shit it has to grab me immediately or I’m not playing. There’s a high chance that if it doesn’t grab me immediately I’ll never finish it.
don’t feel bad, I bought it and haven’t even unwrapped it yet.
There is nothing to be embarrassed about. When you stop enjoying, you stop playing. I’m having a lot more fun doing that. Many universally loved games, I will ditch in 10 hours or so just because I find them painfully boring (Super Mario Odyssey, Metroid Prime). Others I’ll enjoy for a while and might give up when they’re 80% complete (Spider-Man Remastered). I have left one game right at the last boss fight because I had had enough (Guacamelee 2, loved that game, gave it up at 95%), and I loved the experience and I’ve never gone back. Just play as much as you enjoy.
Very Important and Impactful Award Winning Games tend to be kind of a bummer to actually play. Play something fun instead.
Same, I also haven’t beaten New Vegas and I barely started Baldur’s Gate 3 before dropping that
FNV is the other one in my library I bought thinking I’d like it because it’s so fondly talked about.
I keep thinking about trying BG3 but I have a feeling it’ll end the same way
I wouldn’t worry about it; try playing an actually fun game instead.
