Ask HN: Has anyone else stopped playing video games as an adult?

i used to play doom back in the 90s using dwango...I stopped gaming when Quake came out and rendered my 486 useless

[dead]

> I'm wondering if this happened anybody else

Yes.

> if so, why you think it happened

Too many other time commitments, with no "free time" left for video games.

i don't really game unless im playing something with friends in a social setting, or its something i've been fiending to play for years. other than that, i can never find the time

Games are designed to be addictive, so once you stop its like quitting soda.. eventually you lose the taste for it.

Though, I noticed a lot of satisfaction from my life comes from interactions with others. Games no longer encourage quality interaction like they used to. Your friends get older then get married and get busy, so theres less of that. I usually analyze a game and decide if its wasting my time or improving my time on this earth.

Then there are the single player games. I feel like these had more meaning when the market wasn't as saturated. A lot of times you're just chasing nostalgia from that one really good game you've played. Hoping to recapture the same feeling. Not only that, most aaa games now days are now products of money instead of passion.

So if I had to guess why anyone stopped it's probably one of the reasons above.

I got back into gaming recently because that's how I like to spend my down time, intermixed with reading and board games with the kids. Cable TV is terrible these days, and it only takes me a couple of weeks to get through the shows that I do enjoy on the streaming services.

I didn't stop, but the nature of the games I enjoy has changed a bit. Fast action games, multiplayer games, and games that require an enormous investment of time are no longer ones that appeal to me (although turn-based games that last for months very much are). Nor are games produced by the major studios (but that's because I dislike their behavior as companies and has nothing to do with the games themselves).

I tend to spend more time playing tabletop games in person with my friends than video games, though.

Slashem, Asylum, interactive fiction, sokoban, super star trek, some MUDs...

I might not play the former ones I played 15 years ago, but I've got far better stories and gameplay.

That happened to me from around 2003 to 2008. Games became too repetitive and uninteresting. I got back into them for a while but it wasn't until Dark Souls that I truly rekindled (sorry for the pun) my love of what games could be. That was a game that perfectly recaptured my imagination and made it feel like I was a kid in the 1980s playing the original Legend of Zelda again. It was everything the modern Zelda games, which have always been my favorite series, had forgot about. I think Zelda regained its footing with Breath of the Wild which I thought was fantastic, but Dark Souls taught me that there is still great games out there if you look around. I started getting more and more into smaller, independently developed games and although I might not have as much free time, I love to discover new games that aren't just bog-standard shooters or annoying multiplayer games or AAA produced dribble.

I think new games are high commitment too. You could happily enjoy an hour of Fallout 2 or Baldur's Gate 2, but you need many hours for a satisfactory session of Fallout 3 or Baldur's Gate 3. Today's games seem more designed for streamers than players; people who do it as a full time job and require 500 hours of gameplay.

I used to game all the time but completely stopped during college. I always felt like I had more important things to do (invest in relationships, study, read, exercise) and there way no time for gaming. I would still watch a movie or a TV show, but the time commitment there was always much lower.

Since then my responsibilities have only grown (kids, job, house to maintain, etc) so I haven't even tried picking them up again (though I do play Switch with my 7 yr old occasionally)

My tastes have changed a lot but I still do gaming. Now I'm playing Minecraft with my kids and I have a server where a bunch of their friends can join in and build stuff. I'm not interested in Minecraft for it's own sake but as a social club it's great fun. I also tinker with maps and mods for Quake and Doom. Doom was the first PC game I played - on a demo machine at Radio Shack at 7 years old. I don't play the same way but using the engines as a sandbox to create something still holds my interest.

I realized my favorite video games were (co-op) games I played with my brother, like:

- Final Fantasy

- Lost Vikings

- Final Fantasy Tactics

These days we're too busy with other stuff and living too far apart.

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So I was trying to design a (phone) game that is played with others and encourages interaction with each other (vs. the meme where everybody is sitting at the same table, but staring at their own phone.)

Ideally: this game would be co-op, can be played together remotely but gives bonus for playing together in same physical space. Also the game should be casual, so people can have a conversation while playing this game (maybe even gameplay that encourages putting the phones down).

I loved them so much when younger it inspired me to become a programmer. I wouldn’t be in tech without them. Nowadays I don’t play other than with my kids. I believe this decline is because there are so many other problems to solve and responsibilities to take care of when older. When relaxing for an hour of the day I tend to want to do something passive.

I don't play them as religiously as I did when I was younger, that's for sure, but a few years ago I started a tradition around playing video games that has been an absolute blast.

I've got a 120" projector screen in the living room with a giant, half-circle couch that seats ~10 and a good set of speakers. All year I try to find short (1-3hrs), emotionally evocative, single-player video games which aren't demanding of reflexes or wit.

On my birthday, I invite a big group of people over, we all take acid, and we dive deep into a curated set of games for a whole night. We take turns passing around the controller.

It's an absolute blast. I've ran this experience for three years running. People who don't traditionally play video games love to come and watch and get a taste of gaming, sometimes people will pilot the controller for just a short while before getting overwhelmed, but everyone's take away is a shared group emotional experience. There's been standing ovations at the end of some of the years :D

https://i.imgur.com/6F0iSxp.png Here's a list of the games. Highlights have been ABZU, The Beginner's Guide, Milk Inside/Outside a Bag of Milk, and Slay the Princess

To me, what happened is that my tastes have changed. I no longer appreciate games that are huge time-sinks and require grinding or mindless tasks. I prefer things that are engaging and allow quick gameplay sessions. I tend to gravitate to Fighting Games and Indie Games, and I haven't played any of the huge recent AAA successes.

Other than that, gaming with my kids. Minecraft, TMNT: Shredder's Revenge, Cuphead, Lego games, etc.

I only have the patience for roguelikes.

Sitting down and playing a long, open world, cinematic adventure is just not an efficient use of my time anymore. The only time I get to play videogames are brief stolen moments during my week. So I only play games that give me a satisfying "chew" for my time. Trying to come back after a couple of weeks to Red Dead Redemption 2 with only 45 minutes to spend... it's agony.

I also spend 8+ hours a day staring at screens. I don't relish staring at them for leisure. So my indulgence is to pull out a board game.

there's gaming and then there's gaming. Simon tatham's puzzle games are a neatly packaged up bit of fun. and then there's Factorio.

as I got older though, I want to make an impact on the world, and video games, while fun, don't let me do that as much as contributing to an open source project or volunteering or some such. I expect I'll get back into them as I get older.

I still play FPS games specifically to keep my reflexes up. Its a good thing to have going into adult years.

Yes, I just lost interest in games. I found more interesting, useful and enjoyable things in life than games.

My taste in games changed...as a kid my favorites were Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty. Today I play games like Crusader Kings 3 and Kerbal Space Program. There aren't any single-player console games that I find that great, other than Spiderman for Playstation.

Tbh I just play FPS's like COD2/3 and Warzone because they keep the quick decision making and reflexes up. Only like 1hr at a time.

Sitting and playing some random story-type game for 50 hours seems like a complete waste of my time.

I got slower and can't compete with younger players while playing action or even RTS. The other day I decided to give AoE2 a go and was quickly obliterated (and yelled at) by the online competitors. I have also developed a certain sense for patterns and game logics quickly become repetitive and boring.

I lost interest in video games after 3D first-person shooters took over back in the '90s. I never learned to play them effectively, and could not afford to keep up with the hardware-upgrade treadmill they demanded. Video gaming seemed to have become an expensive hobby for aggressive, competitive, trend-following people; I did not want to interact with such people, much less become one, and just... stopped paying attention.

The value proposition has definitely changed since those days: divide the purchase cost of "Baldur's Gate 3" by the number of hours of enjoyment my wife has gotten out of it, and the result is negligible. It's hard to imagine a less expensive form of entertainment short of going for a walk!

Sometimes I still like to play roguelikes (by which I mean games that are like Rogue, and not the mostly-unrelated recent genre also called "roguelike"), of which Brogue is my favorite; it can be a fun little puzzle to bang through when I have ten or twenty minutes to kill.

I stopped for a long period of time, but I go back and forth. I don’t play any new games, though. I play the same two on and off.