Times You've Questioned Why You're Doing What You're Doing In a Game

Man that title sucks.

Anyway, I was wrapping up my time with Ghost of Tsushima recently and decided that I would end my play time after I had collected every outfit variant in the game. I'd completed every quest, found every other item, and essentially done everything you could do in the game aside from getting all of those variants. The catch was that I would need to farm flowers. Lots of flowers. 100's of flowers. After doing that for about an hour, which involved me running all over the map, constantly swiping up on the touchpad to have the wind direct me to the next flower, I had asked myself "what the fuck are you doing?" I then decided that I was done with the game and deleted it from my PS4.

So, I'm curious, when have you all asked yourself that question, 'what are you doing?', while playing a game?

Well, on my three year-long Bloodborne run I've been finding The Old Hunters way too damn hard at level 85 or so so I started really seriously taking the Chalice Dungeons seriously, and I'm currently stuck on a boss so bafflingly broken (the Undead Giant variant with massive maces chained to his back) I'm starting to wonder why I wouldn't just slam my head against Laurence instead.

I kept playing Death Stranding after the story was over to try and complete every delivery and get five stars with all the package people because there was a moment when I had the Level 3 Truck and the BTs were a little more forgiving near the middle of the game that I really fell in love with doing these massive, five stop deliveries across a zone and wanted some more of that now that the story was out of the way...but the BTs still lingered, so it was shortly after I stumbled onto somebody I'd somehow never been asked to deliver a package to (there were located somewhere near the Cosplayer) I just threw up my hands and accepted it was a pointless endeavor.

I could describe my entire, 67% of the trophies play through of Mass Effect: Andromeda as a "what the fuck is wrong with me?" experience this past January.

I drove myself crazy trying to hunt down all the Odin Ravens I'd missed in God of War just to prove how much I loved the game...to who? My trophy list? It wasn't even the Valkyries I was chasing, which I gave up on five or six deep because I just knew it wasn't for me. It was ravens I was after.

Anyone that didn't stop themselves from spelunking for every single sunken crate in Skellige is...something else.

Definitely had this while going through the open world of Assassin's Creed Odyssey. That game is just too bloated, so I stopped. Another example is Destiny/Destiny 2. Eventually I just put those games down because of the repetition and how hard it is for me to group up with people.

Anytime I feel like I should give Dark Souls a go, because people rave enough about it to make me think there's something there. But I get a couple hours in and realise I'm just not having fun.

Destiny, and Destiny 2, both had the same one for me. I'm pretty much a solo player, and both gaves have a point where if you aren't doing the three things that increase your light level, then you are wasting your time - and those things are raids, nightfalls or some extreme crucible challenge, none of which I'm ever going to do.

hmm this is a good question.

there are certain games i fall head-over-heels for...but eventually i'll get self-conscious about either a) the amount of time i'm investing or b) the utter repetition, such that the spell irrevocably breaks...and i generally don't go back to them after. i don't have guilt or shame- but it's almost like a movie's suspension of disbelief shatters, and i start looking for more interesting things. i'll think to myself, "ok- i think i have a pretty good understanding of what this is. i had a good time, but i think i want something new now."

a few examples off the top of the dome:

• world of warcraft (got in on vanilla and stuck it out until a few months after burning crusade)
• stardew valley (70ish hours in i think?)
• animal crossing (80ish hours)

I have been suckered by Destiny 1 & 2 all too often. Blast through the story content, run a couple of strikes and then I just tail off when I find myself farming anything. And any modern open world game. Can't remember the last time I properly finished one.

A lot of RPGs and "action-adventure games" fall into this category for me, although generally the game needs to be kind of lifeless from a gameplay perspective before I get there. For example, I definitely had this problem in AC: Odyssey, but less so in Ghost of Tsushima, even though you could easily argue it has the same issues with bloat.

From a pure story perspective, it's definitely Dragon Age 2. I went through the entire back-half of that game wondering "If my character is now rich, why am I still in this craphole of a city?"

Only with eroge, and the answer usually is "Because I'm lonely."

I have been that way with The Last of Us 2 lately. Not in the “what am I doing, I should stop collecting flowers in this samurai/ninja game whose story I’ve already beaten” way, but more in the way that I’ve spent 80% of my time scanning the environment with the listening skill and high contrast mode, collecting/scavenging items, and crafting so that my inventory is always full. I find myself enjoying that part of the game while trying to just get through or survive the combat/story sequences.

Like, why did I buy this game? To have a horror, combat, dystopia experience, right? Not to collect trading cards and partial rolls of duct tape...right???

This always happens to me in Football manager. Like i set a sort of fun or interesting sounding goal for myself. 'Use this local club with less than 30 visitors and spend 20 years on them until they are the best team in the world.' or 'Go to the crappiest league in the world and make it one of the best footballing nations!' You get the drift.

Currently i'm on 'Make Korona Kielce the best club in the world and buy a bunch of young 16 yo's so they eventually take up polish nationality so the Polish team can be worldclass too!' I blame the corona virus for that.

The problem is... these fun sounding objectives literally take months to a year to complete. Hundreds of thousands randomly generated players with their own histories make the game take ages to progress eventually , no matter the hardware. And when you have achieved it, you look back on your achievement page and you're like hah... well... i did what i set out to do... i guess this is it. And then you never load that savegame anymore.

I wanted to get all the achievements in Just Cause 2, hit about 65% map completion, and wondered what the actual shit I was doing with my life. it kinda broke me on achievements in general.

Platinumming Dark Souls 3 had me questioning why I was running up and down the same set of stairs for covenant items.

When I was doing the "All miracles" achieve to plat Dark Souls. I got the second gravelord spell, and the final miracle, and the achieve didn't pop up, after like ten hours farming those fucking ears.

I actually tihnk I turned it off after that and never reloaded it ever again

From a narrative perspective, the "boss fight" at the end of The Last of Us Part II fits this for me because of how strongly I disagreed with what the game was asking me to do.

From a gameplay perspective... basically any time I'm addicting to collecting something in a game. Most recently that'd probably be leveling up every weapon in Modern Warfare, even the ones I hated using. The Double XP/Shipment 24/7 weekends made parts of that pretty easy though.

This is a big reason I fell off of FFXIV, still one of my favorite games of all time, and Warframe, a game I really really really like, so hard. I don't know if it's too much to say I was addicted at one point, but in both games at some point, I reached a point where I had kinda did what I wanted to do, but felt compelled to keep playing. Then I reached another point where I would just actively complain about the game while I was playing it which wasn't fun for me or the people I was playing with. Then one day it finally sunk in and I asked the question and that was that. FFXIV I still play a lot, but I'll play an hour here or an hour there and be perfectly content whereas I used to do all the content for every patch on release day then desperately try to gear up each and every job as quickly as humanly possible.

Warframe, I took such a long break from that when I finally came back, it was damn near unrecognizable. I'll still dip my toes back in every once in a blue moon though but now it's different. I kinda stop playing because I feel like I'm asking too many questions all the time haha.

I feel potentially this community has a bit of disdain for these people (I'm mostly one of these people, so I'm not shitting on anyone here), but I'd just put down two words - achievement hunting - and leave it at that. Thankfully though, I'm not so OCD that I NEED to 100% all my games (I can easily look at a 'beat the game on the hardest difficulty' or 'hit L100 in mp' achievement and be like, 'pass'), but I will look at a game I've gotten all the achievements I want to do and have a sense of contentment, even if the percentage is only somewhere from 60-90%.

Oh i also got this feeling with Dota.

Like that's my most played game. Thousands of hours, a crew that was always there at a certain time to play 3-6 games. And naturally i played quite some solo queues too. Eventually i was at like a very decent level of dota, and felt that i had a mountain of knowledge built up over the years; Suddenly it felt like i understood most of the intricacies of the game and it would take me another 1000 hours of work on mechanics to reach a new level of understanding. I think i was on a crazy 15 ranked game winstreak when i stopped playing. Sure, it was exciting, but it felt like Dota was pretty much all that i was doing. I could climb the ladder a bit more and be proud of the number, but what for? I was already happy with my current achievement. I performed well, had a decent idea of the gamestate at most times and 95% i ended up in games with other people that knew what they were doing and were not toxic. And it wasn't like i was anywhere good enough to play it professionally, so why did i keep putting this game over literally every other piece of entertainment? Sure it was a lot of fun, and it tickled my competitive spirit, but it soaked up all my time. Still love the game a lot , but i don't need to play it that religiously anymore. I stay in touch and watch the big tournaments instead. Sometimes catch a stream on twitch for a bit.

Haven't had a serious one of those since Death Stranding.

Maybe not the kind of feeling you are thinking of, but I get this sense when playing Rockstar games. In GTA, I wander through the open world for a while, do some missions, screw with the cops, whatever. Fun. But after a few hours of this I always get this strangely empty, depressing feeling. Everything about the worlds they create seems so cynical and tired to me. It's a satire, but not in any constructive or meaningful way that leaves any lasting impression. I'm really only talking about GTA3 and 4 - never even bothered with 5 for this reason, despite all the acclaim it got. I don't need my games to have some moral lesson, but I want some feeling beyond "Hey, everything sucks and nobody's a hero. Just go do whatever the fuck you want."

It seems soulless to me, especially compared to something like, say, Zelda games, which always seem like labors of love and manage to feel momentous and important somehow despite the simplicity of the stories.

Gran Turismo Endurance Races for me lol

This is pretty much why I stopped playing World of Warcraft many years ago. I had previously fallen off of playing it before Burning Crusade but relapsed for the release of Wrath of the Lich King. I was back into the swing of it and at one point when I log in I was going through the check list of what I was doing for the day: "Okay gotta do my dailies, farm some gold, farm some rep, there's a raid coming up in the afternoon, etc." Then I had to stop and say: "Wait a minute....what the hell am I doing? This has become a part time job, except not only am I not being paid, but I'm paying a monthly fee to participate."

So I pretty much stopped with MMOs altogether after that. I will say I cherish my time spent with WoW, had a great experience with the game. But geez man I like playing a variety of video games a bit too much to subject myself to that level of investment again. It's not like I'm not tempted to give MMOs another try, all the hullabaloo for Final Fantasy XIV has piqued my interest on more than one occasion. I just don't think I can do it like I use to anymore. It doesn't help that it's the best time to be playing video games.

They should've kept B-Spec. :(

I occasionally get this feeling when I can't finish up a roguelike. I kept playing Nuclear Throne for months and just couldn't beat it. Enter the Gungeon and Neon Abyss were two others where I felt like I couldn't move on with my life until I completed them (luckily, I did and won my freedom). Really for no reason, other than I invested time and it'd be a shame to quit now.

It also happened with multiplayer in general. If I spend too much time with a game chasing some rank or whatever, I just ask myself why and delete it. These days, unless a game really hooks me and the gameplay itself is enjoyable, that sort of endless grind for ranks or unlocks feels like a waste of my time. If I stop having fun, I move on.

Other than that, these days I'm getting a lot better at putting down a game that has me questioning this stuff. Although the most common thing is when I'm in an open-world, can mainline it within a few missions but got distracted, and just focus back on the mainline again to finish the game.

Ohh i also always end up feeling like this when i play a free to play mobile game. Especially those with timers. I'm someone that wants to play these games as optimal as possible, which means that i keep a mental note with me of when i should check back in on the f2p game to re-start the timers. I think at my maximum, i'm able to live like that for a month or two before i decide that i should get off the treadmill and delete the game entirely.

I did find out that games like Sudoku and Picross are exactly the phone games that i do enjoy and don't feel bad about. Bless puzzles.

@onemanarmyy: Good call. Mobile games make me feel like this all the time. I only really stick with the same Jewels game I've played for ten years when I have 20 minutes to kill now and then. And Konami's PixelPuzzle because it's just inherently good fun without any F2P intrusions.

Yes, I get this with every game at around 90% completion when I can see the end in sight and know I have to essentially grind until the end and not really get anything new along the way. If the story is compelling I don't feel like this. Some games are simply infinitely replayable to me, like Dark Souls. This feeling is what keeps me from ever getting past lvl 40-50 or so in MMOs.

Basically it's boredom coupled with existential dread. And they feed into each other.

Every time I've played a Persona game. Scheduling time between classes, boring dungeons or anime stereotypes. I always end up thinking 'why am I not spending time with my real friends instead?' or 'I could learn a new skill or just take a walk!' Anything but keep playing. And those games are really the only ones that always make me having those thoughts.

I've started to get this when playing open world games (so like all games these days right?) when I'm doing missions and clearing out dungeons/areas of enemies. Most recently it occurred during AC Odyssey. It's odd because if I keep my time to games like it's ilk to shorter hour sessions and try to vary up what I do from time to time it's easier to feel like your at least getting something. But for sure I feel like modern games ask so much of the player to manage their time in an efficient and enjoyable manner. Sure they often provide you with a smorgus board of things to do, but it's up to the player to vary both their time and their activity diversity. You spend too much time doing one or a few of the activities (often because early on you like them most) and you just burn out on the game entirely, and like the OP says can just lead to a straight uninstall.

When I pumped a good 50 hours into Witcher 3 I tried to avoid this as best as possible by spending some free time every session running around and picking up flowers, and not just streamlining my experience. It seems small and petty, and oddly the type of thing that can make you instantly question your experience, but it actually helped for overall location and world building. Spending less time in menu's, and on the "grind" of these sort of games and just enjoying what your doing goes a long way to not feeling burned out and asking yourselves if some other activity would make much more sense.

It's odd because MP games despite being designed for you to spend hours into them are structured in such a way that it's a lot easier to manage your time without getting burnt out. They generally are structured into matches, rounds, or sessions, so dropping in when your feeling tired or dropping out when your not is much easier than suddenly realizing you want a breather from something while your in the middle of an important quest or grinding near a platinum/higher completion rate in SP stuff. The repeated prevalence of RPG mechanics on everything has also created a situation where a bunch of these open world SP games have zero pacing; when in reality a more streamlined experience would probably lead to less burnout.

We could wind up in a situation where a lot of these games that offer "tons of content" to keep players there forever find they have no audience because players simply grow sick of the content before completing it. Hopefully developers pay attention to this sort of thing, because looking at the games coming out it does seem like we are getting a lot more of the same. The lack of respect some games have for it's users time, patience, or even fortitude to keep repeating the same tasks/activities on loop is a pretty big criticism I'd say of games these days.

Anytime a game has lots of collectibles. I can’t help thinking about all the other things I could have done in that time.

This is pretty rare for me. I like all of the meaningless collecting that seems to inspire this in others and in general if I'm done with a game in that matter it's not the result of some moment of clarity I tend to just... Stop.

MGSV - Left it running actively on my PC for days to make a nuclear bomb. I remember this game being released during a heat wave in my area, so the heat generated by my PC only made my bedroom hotter. Shame uninstalled after I got the achievement.

@therealturk said:

I had a similar thought midway through Red Dead Redemption 2 where I had accumulated thousands of dollars selling dead animals and jewelry, yet I'm living in a swamp tent with losers who only contribute pennies to the collection box.

I like the idea of global warming being a bi-product of people trying to give nuclear disarmament a go in a fictional universe.

I completed MGSV doing almost all the side content even though by the 20 hour mark I had long since realized that I'd be doing the exact same 3 missions in the exact same 5 locations over and over again until the end, as I had been doing. I really hate that game yet I kept playing it anyway, constantly thinking "why the fuck am I doing this?"