ADHD

I can't speak for everyone, but I absolutely do not play videogames like a normal person. I play videogames like a squirrel hoarding nuts for winter. I play videogames like the red-string-and-photos corkboard meme. I play videogames like I was assembling a sand mandala in the middle of a crowded lobby. I play videogames like the movie Memento. I play videogames like I was juggling ventriloquist dummies while chugging a liter of sparkling water and reciting Modern Major General at speed.

I can't speak for everyone, but I absolutely do not play videogames like a normal person.

I don't even enjoy playing them but I keep doing it. I feel guilty or that I'm wasting my time. I get tired of being me.

I don't care to aim for 100% in games, but I'll put it this way: I found wuthering waves 2ish months ago and already have 300 hours in it...

It's either obsession or bust for me. But that's with everything in life almost.

Currently obsessed with silk song too. But then it could end any second.

I didn't game any video for almost two years prior. Like at all. Excitement suddenly gone.

I went into board games and trading cards instead. It's really annoying sometimes to lose interest after so much investment of time and money and emotion.

Brain is weird man.

My NT husband switches between games. In one sitting. I look up from drawing evey once in a while and, wtf since when is Mario in Ass Creed? Not that he doesn't like the game, he always comes back to it after a while and finishes most of what he plays. He just gets bored after a bit and loads up another one. And they tell me I have attention issues.

When I start a game, I either drop it after one sitting or I am 150% in (and sometimes I get so deep into a game that I stop playing shortly before the end because I don't want it to end - fuck this brain (I need to finish Cyberpunk 2077)). I actively avoid certain games because I know they'll eat me. Instead I'll sit and draw for 37 hours a day without needing sustenance or the loo, which is much more healthy and socially accepted and even encouraged by my therapist.

I don't personally care about achievement hunting or 100%-ing games, but otherwise I am exactly the same yes. If a game piques my interest it becomes a hyperfixation that consumes every waking hour, and I will spend as much free time as possible either playing it, watching others play it, watching videos about it, or reading things about it.

I also don't really understand people who are juggling multiple games at a time. "Oh, today I'll play some X, tomorrow I'll play some Y and over the weekend I'll enjoy some Z!". Sounds completely foreign and bizarre to me. I have my current game, and if I'm playing a game I'll be playing my current game. Who has the bandwidth to keep track of multiple games at once?

I made a rule where I can only play one game at a time. It helps keep me on track between times not playing games, which is fairly often. Makes it easy enough.

If I never had kids, I'd be right there with you.

I had to get in the habit of waiting for specified times (after bedtime/weekend mornings) to play games.

Oh, and it's Borderlands this weekend for me.

Depends how much I like the game and how busy I am otherwise.

This is why I love the sims, I get obsessed for x amount of time. I go to work if I have to, but then I'll play sims every other second I can, I'll even bring the laptop into the bathroom with me. Won't sleep, won't cook, won't shower, etc. And then... all of a sudden, mid game even, I'm just... done. For months. Or years. And it's a sandbox game, it's literally digital barbies, so I can just stop and start over with a whole new game later. If im playing a more traditional game, I NEED to 100% it. I NEED a walk through to make sure I don't make any wrong choices, it almost takes some of the fun out of it, so I don't play those kinds that often (my roommate recently let me play Spiritfarer on her console, she had 40hrs and 98% and was like "its not important to the story and i cant find the last one... I got to 100% after 84 hours. We are not the same)

You are the one here playing games like a normal person

Your husband sounds like they are just more interested in other things usually.

Hah, the same here. That's why recently I'm avoiding playing videogames at all.

Do I like the game: i'll play the through main story
Do I really like the game: I'll complete the side stories (assuming they arent tedious)

I was never one to 100% a game and only did it for select games (one I did a bit of 100% hunt was 'untitled goose game').
My time is too much worth as to "waste" it on 100% a game. Nobody except for me will care about it.

Instead I'll invest my time into my homelab/home-network. That way get a higher sense of an achievement.

Regarding my play style:
I'll usually play one story at a time and if it's a multi part game I'll research beforehand how important the story before was.
Is it unimportant or too expansiv, I'll watch a summary or playthrough on Youtube. If it's up my alley, I'll play in chronological order.

As for how often:
I have my phases. Either YT binge watching, watching something from my media library or I'm tinkering with my homelab. Playing went to a backseat for me since I starte an actual job full-time.

I rarely have the discipline to actually 100% anything, but I do play with that goal and tend to hyperfocus on games, often to my detriment. Not every game though. Sometimes it'll be months until another game really grabs me, and maybe I'm playing stuff more casually in between. Also I tend to go back to old favorites a lot.

For example I finally picked up Horizon: Forbidden West and for the first time in years even my favorite archaeology channels have unwatched content. My 4am bedtime is not great and last week someone at work asked me if I forgot to brush my chompers. But before that it was a 3rd or 4th playthrough of Witcher 3.

Factorio was the last game that truly grabbed me by the short-and-curlies. At my worst, I was playing for 8-10 hours a day (with a full time job taking another 9 hours) and started seeing conveyor belt designs in my dreams.

LMAO I knew for a fact this about silksong, and yes I got hooked on that game very similarly too you

Anyway, anyone else playing Silksong?

I tried with HK and gave up after going over halfway through, taking a break, and getting slaughtered repeatedly upon the skills drop from the break. I have since learned that I'm no masochist and prefer my max health solidly in the double or triple digits (if the game has health at all).

I collect video games, and also have a small handful i enjoy to a probably unhealthy degree.

The former is me finding crazy deals and wanting to support game studios whose content interests me.

The latter is my escapism. Sometimes I want to just lap the shit out of Nurburgring Nordschliefe, or slice-and-dice space ships in sandbox mode, or build a Soviet republic, or play a modern iteration of Escape Velocity with surprisingly tight and far-spanning plot, or get into some 6-DOF interstellar combat, or drive shooty botes around, or get into some pvp dogfights with recent and historic fighter jets.

Haven't touched silksong. I tend to game in binges. I mostly play civ and ksp and will usually dump 10 hours or so in a session, but I don't do that very often, maybe twice a month nowadays. In my youth I'd game for hours and hours. I'm pretty sure I logged like 700 hours in skyrim in 2012 alone, and I didn't even get it til July that year

I don’t get like this with every game, but yeah that’s how Silksong has been for me.

I was like you when I was still playing video games. All the Arkham games and some of the early Assassins Creed games were my obsessions. Prince of Persia and Uncharted too. A few zombie games. Mario too.

However, I haven't played video games since 2015 for several reasons:

1. I disagreed with the direction of games back in 2015 when I noticed they were becoming more and more online focused and predatory toward players in terms of microtransactions and stuff like that. I felt that if I was supposed to get to play the games I wanted to play, it would eventually cost me so much money to upgrade entertainment systems and computers and I would not get to keep any of my games because everything was digital and could be taken from me at any point. I learned my lesson early on Facebook of all places with the death of Restaurant City (RIP my beauty).

2. it was too time consuming and I wanted to spend my time developing skills instead of playing video games.

3. my fucking temper, bro. This is the main reason I don't play video games anymore. I didn't like how infuriated I would get when I kept losing in a game. I have a temper. I really have a temper, but when it comes to video games and certain electronics, I would just become a Demon when shit didn't go my way. And I didn't want to feed that beast so I just stopped.

The only game I bought and paid for post 2015 was What Remains of Edith Finch. Played it once. Loved it. Watched a bunch of videos about the game, theories and so on and then I moved on.

Now I have my best friend who is a gamer, who plays video games on Twitch once a week so we can hang out and talk about our lives. It's cool.

Ps: not officially diagnosed. Just have a lot of symptoms to the point where it's a walk like a duck and quack like a duck scenario. So yeah, not officially one of you, but I can relate A LOT to things I read from and about ADHDers.

SHAW!

I am sorta in between the two. There are a few games or series that I will always come back to and play the new ones when they come out but I don't play very often. Some times I will play a lot all at once maybe 5 days out of 7 for 3 or 4 weeks. Most of the time I will play maybe 1 to 2 days a fortnight and only for an hour or 2 each time I do.