Factorio. I blinked and a month went by the first time I played it. It ruins my sleep schedule like no other.

Absolutely love it

Minecraft, holy shit, I have a singleplayer, creative world that I spent hours every day building on for 8 years or so.

That map is gigantic, and I even saved it from a hard disk crash

AuDHD means every game is part of an addiction phase. I will binge a game for like 100hrs then drop it out of nowhere. Then return right where I left off anywhere between 6 months and 4 years later.

I think most here are too generous with the term addiction.

I had to uninstall Hearthstone years ago, because I compulsively played it multiple hours every single day, despite not really having fun playing it anymore. It was either grinding to get cards or tilting on ladder. That's what I would call an addiction.

Edit: After Hearthstone I played a lot of Slay the Spire and after that Marvel Snap. Never more then I enjoyed it, so I wouldn't count those.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon. Spent years on that one.

I wasted some 2-3 years of my life in CSGO too when I was younger. All my free time, down the drain basically. It wasn’t even fun after a while, just a hard, tiring grind. Attempted to compete on semi-pro level, somehow got it to my head that it was possible. Did compete ultimately, but none of my teams made it. Never got anywhere and the day I finally got off it was the best day of my adult life. It was bad.

I feel ashamed to admit this out loud. It’s just so cringeworthy. But it does some good to keep my head level and remember the shortcomings of my younger days.

Nowadays the closest I get to “addiction” level is bingeing a few months worth of evenings on the likes of Crusader Kings 3, M&B Bannerlord, Stellaris or Rimworld. Much more sane since it’s not as intensive, it can be paused at any moment, and ultimately there’s an end to it, so it just naturally withers away from my days eventually.

I was in university and had just passed my midterms and as a treat for myself picked up both KOTORs. Mainlined that shit.

The worst for me was elder scrolls: oblivion. I played it on xbox back when it came out. I played nothing else for about 18 months. I must have had thousands of hours by the time it got old.

I spent over a decade addicted to World of Warcraft. Like, I would come home from work and immediately jump on WoW and do nothing else until bedtime.

Thankfully, Activision buying out Blizzard and then ruining the game made me eventually quit. I've tried to go back, but I can't get into it anymore. It's just no fun.

The last few expansions, I've spent a week burning through the main questline, then I walk away until they announce another expansion. Endgame content is not interesting enough to keep me after the main story is over. I never even finished the last two expansions; I checked out partway into the story. I think I'm officially done buying expansions for WoW and hoping I can get back into it.

Other games that I've been addicted to in recent times have been Satisfactory and Enshrouded. Both base building games that have no end, but rely on your creativity to enjoy.

I have ADHD (the hyperfocus type) and Satisfactory really scratches that itch. Focusing on minute details, trying to make a seamless, efficient, organized factory to produce an end product. And the sky's the limit (literally). You can build hundreds of factories across a massive map and get really creative about style, design, efficiency, etc. it's a really fun creative game.

Enshrouded is the same, except instead of efficient factories, you're building homes, villages, castles, etc. in a fantasy medieval setting. With questing and monsters and magic too! It's been loads of fun and my friends and I have been super addicted to that game for a while now too. I actually just posted a review about it in !games@lemmy.world yesterday.

On a side note, I find it interesting to see Minecraft mentioned a lot in this thread. That game first came out when I was in my 20s (I'm in my 40s now) and it was pretty popular when it first dropped. I played it a bit, but besides running around and digging (mining?) a bit, there wasn't really any direction or goals or anything, so I kind of lost interest. I found out years later there's a whole endgame to it, but without any in-game directions, there was no way I would've ever progressed in that game without online help.

Decades later, Minecraft got a resurgence of popularity with younger generations and now it's suddenly the game of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. One of my baby nephews is addicted to that game now and speaks of almost nothing but Minecraft. Crazy how it can continue being so popular across multiple generations like that.

About 20 years ago I played world of warcraft every day and every awaken hour of the day or just about. School was over and I lived with my parents and was "looking for work". Let's just say that I played vanilla so much that I had guild members calling in the middle of the night to get together for world boss killing.

Since then I have realized that is not how to go about in life and last time i really got stuck was with Factorio.

Battle pass shit aside, I really like Apex Legends. Probably has some dark patterns but still I really like their gunfights.

Minecraft, on a server with friends. We still play it

For a while it was Elite Dangerous. Reached triple Elite, then eventually Odyssey drops and I stopped playing. After Elite was Baldurs Gate 3. Bg3 was the fastest 1000+ hours I’ve ever dropped in a video game

Civilization, Civilization 2, Civilization 3 and FreeCiv

Just one more turn. Looks up. Where did the day go?

I finally kicked the habit with FreeCiv.

For me, this only happens in story-based games. The most recent was Expedition 33. It’s also the first time a videogame has ever made me cry. What an incredible ride that was.

historically: gmod. recently: oxygen not included.

At different times:

Luanti (AKA Minetest)

0AD

Sauerbraten

Battle for Wesnoth

Shattered Pixel Dungeon

and further back:

Action Quake 2

WipeOut 2097 (AKA XL)

Hades, I spent like 6 months playing almost nothing else. Platinumed it and still couldn't get enough, and I'm not even that good at it!ಥ_ಥ I managed to get to 25 heat I think.

It's a toss up between Hardspace: Shipbreaker, My time At Portia and Just Cause 3 for me. Three very different games. Floaty slicey boom, cute engineer mining and grapple fly shooty basically 🤣

Also very much in an "addiction phase" for the demo of G-Rebels which sadly goes away on Sunday 😥

Original World of Warcraft.

I put years into that game. Then I started a family and I just had to quit.

If my gf (now wife) played we'd probably never get anything done.

Modded Factorio. I did 450 hours of pyAnodon's recently and it just broke me. I didn't win the game. I feel like I lost at it and life.

It seems impossible to manage the side products properly. Ridiculous amount of materials that are all interrelated means that if you are low on one thing, it is very hard to fix it because you need the thing to work to make anything.

Too many recipes means it is very difficult to make modular, adaptable designs to copy and paste. Advanced recipes seem better, but they end up just exacerbating the issue even more.

850 hours on Skyrim and counting.

I seem to have it under control now.

GW2. When i first started playing it many moons ago, I couldn't stop playing it! It was so addicting.

Sadly, Fall Guys. Little did I know when I started playing it when it released for free on PSN that it would become my most played game of all time. Having 8 of us to make 2 complete teams with every night was a lot of fun. It was just an easy game to play, but not think while playing and just talk with friends for an hour or 2 a night. Some of the funniest conversations I've ever had was during this game. This month marks 5 years of playing this on average 5 times a week. Sadly this year we all finally drifted and I barely played the last few months but maybe once or twice a week and with 1 or 2 others on a good night. 5 years is crazy long for me, so I will be shocked if we find anything else that grabs us like this ever again, but im hoping.

Duke Nukem 3D.
Then Quake I and II.
I'm still playing the latter many times a week.

Darktide, once I finally got a good grasp of all the major mechanics, which it has a lot of.

Which is awesome because I got the game 2.5 years after its release, when it was finally in a playable and fun state where they finally implemented most of the features they promised and should have been in the game from the beginning, and because of the age I got it for only $20, probably one of my most successful Patient Gamer™ moves so far lol

Approaching 800 hours recently, and it looks like I'm still gonna be spending a LOT more time in it since the most recent major update introduced some noticable change to difficulty (mostly in ways I've always wanted) and I'm getting my rear end handed back to me repeatedly once again in the highest difficulty, like the good old days XD

Souls games.

The most severe was Warframe. Not the most hours, but the most hours in the shortest time. 200 hours in 2 weeks. No I didn't do anything else.

Other than that, Runescape, Minecraft, Baldur's gate 3 all have just deleted days. Runescape and Minecraft have deleted months if not a year of time.

Monster hunter world, by a long way

Factorio. At my worst, I was seeing conveyor belt patterns in my sleep.

Dungeon Master on the Amiga 500 was probably the first, followed by the SSI silver-box Krynn series. Moving over to IBM-compatibles, Sim City ate a ton of my time. SC2k, various AD&D games, and eventually FPS games (especially Team-Fortress-Likes) came to eat up wayyyy too much of my time. My first MMO was FFXI and it ate about every waking moment I was not otherwise occupied. At work, I was looking up gear locations, mobs spawns, etc. and talking on forums. I would later go on to work in the MMO space and played a lot of them for work. Rift: Planes of Telara from alpha until the (first?) major revamp was the last game to really do that to me. Ever since, I will get briefly addicated to games, but nothing lasts... and that's probably good with everything else I have going on. I do get super into Skyrim once ever couple years, though, and put an unhealthy amount of time into it.

Minecraft and Factorio.

Both mixed in a little IRL depression and I was living vicariously through Steve or making factories.

Hitman: Codename 47

So many. To list some that aren't in the top comments:

Foxhole - This one gets to a point where it becomes an obligation. It feels like work that I'm not getting paid for. And still I'll easily get sucked into defending a town or advancing a front for days on end between periods of burnout, checking statuses at work and staying up way past my bedtime, decimating my sleep schedule and productivity in the process.

Don't Starve Together - My partner and I took a week off and were supposed to go camping but we ended up playing this too late the night before we were supposed to leave. We woke up really early to pack the car and it took about five minutes for us to go, "nope, this ain't happening". So instead we spent the entire week locked in our apartment playing DST from the moment we woke up to the early hours of the morning and living off of our camping provisions.

League of Legends - I played a lot of LoL back in its early days. My dorm had awful internet so when I came home for the summer it was pretty much all I would do all day every day. It brought out a bad side of me. Losing felt awful and winning was never satisfying enough. I've been clean from LoL for over 10 years now. Sometimes I still think about downloading it but I've so far kept the strength.

Neverwinter Nights and Planeshift are the two that come to mind

Minesweeper. I've had a period where I played it 3 hours a day. Eventually forced myself to delete it from my phone.

Tetris Effect Master Mode

Have you tried Tetris The Grand Master 4? Came out a just a few months ago.

I'm sorry/you're welcome.

Dark Souls 1 and Hollow Knight