Ask HN: What games could you spend a lifetime playing?

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RTS games like Starcraft or Age of Empires. Infinite replayability.
Same, AOE 2 has this equilibrium between strategic planning, detailed economic management and precise military maneuvering
I wish I could play it on an android tablet.
Roguelites, RTS, City Builders.

But people can find fun in anything. People still play Skyrim.

Ive got 3000 hours on HOI4
Chess. All the other games start to bore me at some point.
Factorio
I love that game, was about to mention it, glad somebody else already did it.
Skyrim and The Witcher 3 are cool. I could play them over and over.
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, Warzone 2100, Sudoku
> Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

Do you play multiplayer?

Universal Paperclips[1] - The only reason I quit after 100 times through it was a mistake at the final question.

[1] https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

It's a replayable game? I won it once but I didn't really see anything new worth replaying.
It's something you learn to optimize after a few passes, I got to the point where I made it through the game in 2-3 hours.
we thought it was the AI who would turn everything into paperclips, but it was really the prompt engineer
Football manager (I'm quite deep in a save and have led them to 2066)

Civilization is the classic if you can fight off long enough in the end game on decent difficulty, although I play on easy so I discover nukes by about the 1700’s

Haven't tried it yet, but I'm interested to see if https://zenithmmo.com/ becomes such a game.

(VR MMORPG with good reviews, especially the mechanics, needs balancing work)

Dwarf Fortress, Factorio, Crusader Kings II and III, Baldur's Gate I and II, Rimworld, Cave of Qud, angband, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
Super Mario 64… most favourite game ever.
Red Dead Redemption 2, Minecraft, WoW. In that order.
Nethack and its various variants.

I've been on Evilhack for the last 2 years and can't beat it yet, even though I ascended Nethack many times.

Honestly, it's hard to say, since I think I'd get tired of just about anything if I did it for too long/without any changes. Zelda Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are pretty close to me (and I played the former on/off for like 5 years), and I'll always probably be able to play a multiplayer game like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, but a bit of variety will always be necessary.
If gamer populations lasted forever, maybe I could fly helis in BF4 forever. I was top-rated in my state for a while. Probably my single favorite gaming experience overall.

I get a lot of replay out of some single-player games: Rimworld, Slay the Spire, Skyrim, Fallout 3. I just found shattered pixel and I like that a lot, and could see replaying it a bunch. I fly quadcopter sims a lot, too, and still enjoy that a bunch.

BFBC2 for me. For a while I was able to experience that feeling of helping the team, reviving people and what not. Hours would fly on that game. Never could reproduce.
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Counter-Strike. It's like badminton for me. There's decent strategy and such but it boils down to speed, reflexes, and muscle memory/intuition. There's the newer shooters, but CS gets the essence just about right for me.

I used to play FIFA competitively and did quite well. A friend went full pro. But at the higher levels, it's all exploits; you know what ranges are a balance between accuracy and non-performing goalkeepers, you know the unblockable passes.

I played a beat em up online where someone was cheesing through by attacking, then interrupting the attack animations to attack again.

CS uses nearly the same engine year after year and it's been tested through by so many competitive gamers that I'd trust it to work well after 10000 hours of experience.

DayZ

The GTA series

Most of the Battlefield series, especially 2-4

Microsoft Flight Simulator

Perhaps, Minecraft.