When did you stop playing games for fun.

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.

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Dygz

I don't play MMORPGs to win.
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.

Noaani

Sunboy wrote: »

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.

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.

Sunboy

Noaani wrote: »

Sunboy wrote: »

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.

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.

Solvryn

Vaknar wrote: »

So, I think I understand what you're getting at here.

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

Fun is when we get to use the skulls of our enemies as chalices for mead!

Songcaller

Solvryn wrote: »

Vaknar wrote: »

So, I think I understand what you're getting at here.

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

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.

NishUK

I was only "pure fun driven" in and before early teens with games on the NES, SNES, Megadrive, PS1 and games like FF7-10 and Zelda 64.

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

Veeshan

When pve got so predictable and easy, hence why i only play games with pvp because players act in more unpredictable ways normally and kept thing interesting.

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.

Villefort

hmmm---I haven't reached that mindset yet.
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

Diamaht

This may not be popular but I think a lot of us are dodging the question a bit. We even talked him into rephrasing it because it made us uncomfortable. I'm willing to bet most of us stopped actually enjoying games at times or even all the time.

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.

Liniker

If the game has PvP, it's a competitive game for me, and the "fun" in a competitive game for me is winning, I don't play PvP games to lose, or to be an average player, so everything that is against that goal, like picking a cute race, class, or build that isn't the best for what I want, or doing things that will waste my time and progression, is not fun

ariatras

In the past, I've been really vocal against things like DPS meters, the topic of this thread is one of the reasons why.

It all started when I was in primary school. I first learned about noughts and crosses (tic tac toe)I had fun with it until the game was "solved" after that I simply stopped finding it fun, because you always draw.

Now, this is a far cry from the complexity of games nowadays, but it does carry over.
Classic WoW for example. When I first started, it was all new, everyone was a noob. Ultimate and efficient levelling paths weren't a thing, set gear progression wasn't a thing, for it was still difficult in some cases to gauge BiS items. Especially for melee.

I started classic again about a year and a half ago, picked a class I had never played back then, the opposite faction (so no knowledge of quests) and just didn't look up things, it made it more enjoyable to me, for sure. But seeing the effect of things (i.e. numerical damage numbers) caused me to figure out by large what was optimal. And as much as I enjoy optimising things. (Fleet compositions in Stellaris for example) Not so much in my MMOs. MMOs don't usually allow me to go for wacky builds, if they are even available. Because, if players get all the information, they will start to demand certain optimisations. And often things like dispel, crowd-control, buffs or other things that don't damage aren't quantified.

So in short, the moment games and their playerbase start going for hyper optimisation is when I stop having fun. I play different genres of different games for different reasons. A platformer I might like to optimise. RPGs and MMO-RPGs I play for immersion and the social aspect, the latter of which seems incredibly incompatible with the focus on cookie-cutter and optimalisation.

Wandering Mist

You know it's funny, I used to never play games for fun. There was a time where I was extremely competitive, back when I did progression raiding and hardcore grinding in LoL to reach Diamond rank.

Now though, I honestly can't be bothered. Maybe I'm just showing my age but I prefer to take things slower, more relaxed. Nowadays I only play games for fun. The moment I stop having fun, I stop playing.

Uboon

I started playing games only for fun. Then I realised there were win conditions and losing was not fun. So I started grinding for power & progression and that was fun. Until games trapped me in longer and longer grinds that killed the fun. So I thought I'll just play the game my own way in my own time and have fun. But then I couldn't competitively play some content and that didn't feel fun at all. So I joined a decent guild and contributed in fun group challenges. But guilds move on, and I was left alone, sitting under a tree for the last 10 minutes of life in game. Funny how it goes really.

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