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When did you stop playing games for fun.
Sunboy
Member
When you reach a certain age you stop living in the moment and start focusing on winning more then fun. The concept of loosing was not ever in your mind when playing. Your mentality shifts. I have a hard time to give an exact date or game but I think it was around The Legend of Zelda to the NES. I think I was 9.
I know this looks sad but I still enjoy games. It’s not black and white.
I know this looks sad but I still enjoy games. It’s not black and white.
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Let me rephrase. When did you stop thinking about games as only games.
As well as for open world activity games such as New World or some similar game that has some kind of open world non shared participation for reward - they will utilize every bit of effort into going around logical gameplay ways into highly speed rushing play for profit kind of mentality, the same way they ruined chest runs in New World they will ruin every open world shared participation content in every other MMO.
I do not want to mention for example casual random BGs in WoW... How many times I got angry because some people cannot control themselves and start poking me or other people because of their competitive drive... Why did Suares bite another football player when he did not have any other way to stop him from achieving goal, why do some footballers make foul on purpose.... (you may say it can be done to stop player and get a yellow card, but from integrity perspective - is it nice to do that?)
If you look from competitive perspective everything can become a reason to do if it serves your needs, but if you look from integrity and virtue point, you realize that there is more to the world then what you may see as a highly competitive person...
So yea, I try to not become selfish competitive player, instead I focus on having fun in MMOs whatever that means...
I find the comment ironic.
Even by your definition of fun, I'm blessed in that I've never really gone down that path too much. I'll push through frustrating 'stuck' parts, because it's hard for game designers to be perfect, so a few pain points are expected.
But things that are explicitly designed in ways that are not fun, or even when I can tell that the optimal method for something isn't fun for me, don't get a lot of my time.
I don't care about losing, I care about the times when 'playing the way I want to' isn't a thing the game really 'allows', which means that for competitive games, I can equally easily 'enjoy losing 0-50' because I'm having fun, or 'hate winning 20-0' because my opponent refuses to let the contest be enjoyable.
So I think that for me specifically, IF this ever changed, it was for some relatively short period when I was very young, and changed back at some point.
The games are fun BECAUSE I play them to win or to compete or to even just get all the achievements. Otherwise I wouldn't be playing them.
Of course it counts but I was thinking more of when the abstract concept of fun began to blur and not the more emotional fun.
But reading your post. You should consider yourself blessed and lucky.
Big tru! ❤️
Yeah I think so. Can you clarify more of your definition of it, though? My group members would probably be glad to throw in their data too.
The definition of fun I usually use when designing games is related to my fortune in life.
"Fun is expressing your self/style in order to face a challenge that can be overcome."
This applies whether the challenge is set by yourself (such as a game that is technically unbeatable, but you can challenge yourself to reach a high score/high skill level) or by the game.
In my perspective, if a game is just 'pattern matching trying to find the way the designer wanted you to do it', and you can't express your own style, it can be 'entertaining' and even 'engaging' but I don't call it 'fun'. Similarly, if the game gives absolute style freedom but no goals at all and you don't have any way to use your style to distinguish your outcomes from anyone else's (basically everyone arrives at the same outcome) it's a leisure activity like... knitting, or 'walking on a beach', but not 'fun'.
I'm pretty interested in your perspective on it. But if this is getting too deep or derailing, just ignore me.
No no I like these conversations sometimes. You wanted my definition of fun? Well.. if you want me to quantity it simply then it would be when I smile. Not a fancy answer but I think sometimes easy questions have easy answers.
All of my friends make fun of me for being a try hard. Something I have always tried to explain is that I am playing the only way I know how, I am not actually trying hard. I also find trying hard to be fun though, and I absolutely disagree, winning is fun but so is losing, just depends on the reasons behind each.
I've always play games with efficacy in mind, so I'm always having fun and I'm always winning.
Im not sure what statement you disagree with but let me counter argument if its the firtst statement i made. We are born with a blank slate. You grow up up learning things and develop more and more consciousness as time go. For example, toddlers and dogs give love unconditional, they do not question the reason behind things. Dogs like to chase things and toddlers like other things. They just are. But we are not dogs and develop a more complex consciousness of morality, reason, intelligence, etc. When this happens, not that its at a specific magic point but a gradual one, i do think that that it is then fun things becomes less pure. Example, Scoring a goal is fun but you also have things like, status, respect, honor, etc. Our brains cannot just turn these things off and go back to the pure fun we had. This is the fun im talking about. And its not black and white as i said before. And nobody is wrong for thinking their version of fun is wrong, my idea is certain so different from yours now when we have grown up that its hard to discuss the subject. But as i said to Azheare before, my definition of now fun is when i smile.
Much love and end of rant.
I was disagreeing with "When you reach a certain age you stop living in the moment and start focusing on winning more then fun".
However fun for me is being challenged in the game but also playing with others and feeling relaxed while doing so. Perhaps fun is the same for me, when I have a smile on my face, or maybe just the feeling of contentment I get when I am enjoying the moment.
A few weeks ago I was playing space engineers with some friends, 2 moments where most memorable for me, the first when I crash landed our only space worthy vehicle into the moon and we survived by a hair and we all thought it was an epic moment. The next was not long after when all of us where doing our own farming up to build our base and chatting about random topics while gaming. No purpose, no winning, it was just fun and the game enabled that.
For me, it was when I got into competitive gaming and eventually Esports.
I struggle to play single-player RPGs these days despite how much I love them because it's easier for me to hop on and grind competitive in multiplayer games. Sometimes, I don't even have fun but rather just a drive to win when I do so
This is one of the reasons why I love MMORPGs so much. I get the best of both worlds
There are times when I get into a routine of playing a game regularly, and eventually it feels like a chore that I need to complete every day, like taking out the trash or doing dishes. That's when I quit. Or at least take a break.
But no, I'm 45 years old and games never stopped being fun for me. I also don't play games to be competitive for the sole sake of winning. Games that only exist for that sake (like MOBAs) have zero appeal to me.
I only play MMORPGs for fun.
Well, I'm non-competitive, so... I rarely play games to win.
I mostly play games - even sports games - to be social; not to win.
Not to be presumptuous, but perhaps a better way to ask this question (as I understand it) is, at what point did you start deriving enjoyment from activities due to reasons other than pure fun. For example, enjoying an activity primarily because you are good at it, or primarily because you are learning something new.
You are right. My first post was sloppy and not so specific. It was a post in the heat of the moment.
Fun is when we get to use the skulls of our enemies as chalices for mead!
Or Head hurlers in the earlier warcraft strategy games lol.
Everything from Mario Kart 64, Tekken, Halo 2+, Command & Conquer, my first mmorpg's, early CoD....all competitive and I'm glad.
Players are the ultimate AI, the sometimes best and mostly unpredictable challenge and any game that amplifies that correctly is brilliant. Challenging yourself is entertainment and I couldn't think of anything healthier!.....besides improving verbal tactics to get more people involved
PvE games i have a hard time playing because there to easy and boring for me, i only play games with pve these days if there a chance to get attacked by players via openworld pvp.
I have the opposite problem---fear of finality of reaching end game and the adventure ends. Hence why I never finished Breath of the Wild for example and instead spent so much time exploring in the game and looking for secrets.
maybe it just depends on how competitive a person is? I still have fun even if I lose...within reason lol
I would say examples would be the dailies grind or the gear grind. People grind this stuff out to have the best stuff, but most of the time they are doing it for the gear only. In other words they enjoy having played the game instead of actually playing the game.
We also take the competitive side very seriously. We are not having fun battling others often times, we are angry with our groups mates or angry about "balancing". We are happy when we win, but again that's just happy to have played not happy to play.
We grind out gathering and crafting, but we often don't enjoy getting the materials or making the item. We get that part of it over to get the money. In those times we didn't enjoy crafting, we just enjoyed having crafted.
The more often this happens the further along the road we are to not playing games for fun anymore.
There are other examples (and other types of examples) but the point is, I think a lot of us stop having actual enjoyment far more often than we are willing to admit.