The Witcher 3 is just an RPG minigame you can play between rounds of Gwent.

Any game that has a fishing mechanic will be used as a fishing game.

Stellaris. I cheat and mod to put my empire in the middle of the galaxy and have extremely overpowered player-only technologies. Then I just explore the galaxy and guide the AI; usually picking a favorite and try to help them grow e.g. a peaceful uplifted species in a very hostile galaxy. I've also done this in multiplayer where I played a bit of a Game Master role. Built a quest line as part of my custom mod that had lore and let players slowly discover me and the galactic core (cut off from the hyperlane network; this was all custom scripted before mods like the birchworld existed on the workshop)

When I was a kid I would play driver 3 but I hated the driving part and would mostly walk. I also played a skateboard game and ditch the board, dress up like a spy or specops guy, and run around roleplaying various scenarios in my imagination (because I didn't have any games at the time that would let me stealth or run on rooftops, which is all I wanted)

I spend a solid amount of time in RDR2 camping. I’ll go to town, gather some supplies, and head out in a random direction with no map.

Gather food as I go, hunt for game as I find it, craft supplies, and live off the land.

You can take multiple in-game days to get places and even better is choosing a mountain or similar in the distance and making that your destination.

You still come across plenty of side missions with this approach because of how much is going on in that game, but it feels quite genuine when you do.

Going back a while - Monster Truck Madness 2 was a great game of exploration if you just drove off in a random direction rather than doing that silly racing stuff :-)

The maps were big, and there was no time limit, so you could just go and do your own thing ... a favourite made-up mini-game was sliding around a frozen lake on the winter map.

Just Cause 3

I fire it up just to drive aound / grapple-hook float for an hour or more

Not me, but there’s a great example of this in chess.

There’s an opening called the Bongcloud. You move the pawn in front of your king out for your first move, and then for your second move you move your king up a square. It’s memed as being the strongest opening possible, but it’s actually almost the worst 2 opening moves you can possibly make. Because modern chess does have a large online component and the current best players are young and like memes, it has been played in tournaments, which means that if you play it in an up to date chess programme the programme will name it as the Bongcloud.

A lot of people seem to think that it’s called the Bongcloud because you’d have to be stoned to play it. But almost all chess openings are named after one of three things: a person, a place, or an animal. In this case, the Bongcloud is named after a person - Lenny Bongcloud.

Lenny Bongcloud is a now-inactive user of chess.com. He would always open with the moves described above. That’s because, unbeknownst to them, Lenny wasn’t playing the same game as his opponents. They were trying to checkmate him. He was trying to walk his king to the opposite side of the board as quickly as possible. If he gets checkmated, he loses. If he gets his king to the other side of the board he counts it as a victory and resigns.

So, yeah. One of the oldest known games in the world has an opening the “official” name of which comes from a jokey alias adopted by someone who was deliberately playing the game wrong.

In Rust you can host your own server, and if you do that on your own local network with nobody else connected, then you have a very large world, with only like a couple of things that can kill you, and you can have a very fun, laid-back, relaxing, you know, builder, simulator, survival thing.

And also Skyrim. I have been trying to complete every single side quest and every single add-on side quest that I can, while basically not advancing the game at all. My current game is easily 40 hours in, and I only recently defeated the first dragon that you can kill as part of the main quest.

No Mans Sky exclusively in creative mode.

I don't care for getting resources or any of that. I just want to build stuff and explore. it would be 10x better if they made building regular ships as easy as the new ones and that's my only gripe, having to sit in a station to wait for a ship to show up with a part you want. It's an incredibly idiotic system for creative mode.

I've never finished FF7 because there is a snowboarding mini game that gave me SSX vibes so good I put like 15 hours into it and then stopped playing FF7. No idea what happens in the story but man that Bits and Chitz style mega arcade was fun.

In Kingdom Come: Deliverance, I used a mod to allow unlimited saving. I will do the same for the second game if I ever find time to play it.

Speaking of Hitman, my buddy said Hitman has a club level that is somewhat popular as a place to chill

I enjoyed playing Baldur's gate 3 as a rogue, playing it like a assassin's creed game. Nothing but stealth attacks and running away. Never get into a full combat if possible.

This probably isn't what you mean, but I usually only make like, 3 or 4 military units in Civ 6 and play entirely peaceful, zero war games. And yes I play on deity difficult

In Super Sprint arcade, on the track below, once I get enough lead up on the 3rd or 4th lap, I would enter the red arrow 360 loop and then just keep spinning the steering-wheel left. This makes the car do 2-3 donuts around the loop, until going out of control backwards to explode into the barrier.

Always worth it.

Yes! Action RPGs and I ignore all the RPG because, despite my thorough research, I've been bamboozled by COMBO MAD videos.

Fuck you, NieR:Automata—I'm not collecting 5 mushroom and 3 pyrite or whatever else you want me to collect. I paid for an action game and I'm getting one!

Playing the Tony hawk pro skater demo and trying to hurt ourselves as badly as possible.

Not me but my friend. In any game that has a crafting component they will hone in, ignore the story, and just play the crafting. If it has a marketplace they will sell their creations and basically become an NPC shopkeeper for other people.

I make custom maps in Civilization that essentially turn it into a tower defense

Sorta along the same lines, but, I love how differently my husband and I play Rust. He's on his official server doing what the game is meant for, and I'm just on my pVE building a villa/farm.

We need the farm update on console. I need pies and chickens. With the jungle update, my Lenovo Go can no longer handle Rust at all, so I'm back on console. It's missing some of my favorite features for farm build. I want to chase a chicken for that elusive egg fresh after wipe! And the flowers! Oh...

I just remembered another one - the original Car and Driver game (way before Need for Speed 1) was a vector 3D affair that ran at full speed on a 386.

One of the courses was the San Dimas Mall parking lot - I worked out that I could use the "drop camera" command in one spot, and then it became a radio control car simulator since the 'dropped' camera followed the car being driven :-)

Civilization VI, I usually make "multiplayer" games so that I can set every AI's team and difficulty, and I'll make a somewhat large map with way too many players, each on teams of two or three, and then one AI will be the god-emperor-king that we all have to band together to defeat.

Beamng drive.

I don't actually know the point of this game but it's awesome.

Deus Ex, I play as a superpowered & auhmented supersoldier

Back when I first played Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, I spent way too much time atop some stairs and jump-kicking an orc down, who'd ragdoll down, get up then come back up, only to get another jump kick to the face. I spent several minutes laughing

When I was ~7 years old, I had a Nascar 94 demo for PC, my main mode of play was running the wrong way and crashing as hard as I could on another car, watching all the pieces flying was fun

I also wonder whether there's a "wrong" way to play dorf fortress, since I've tried a lot of stupid shit (it's only stupid if it doesn't work, so...)

Lastly, there's Skyrim with, uh, specific mods

on some of the later pokemon games i was mostly farming berries, quite obsessively, and the semi fun end game "avenue. rather than battling online.

I beat X-COM: Enemy Unknown by sniping the final boss in the first turn with an 8% headshot through a door. In the process, I skipped what I discovered later was a room full of aliens you were supposed to fight before taking out that enemy.

I don't play it any more, but the only thing I did for most of my time playing The Sims was cheat in money and design baller houses. Couldn't have given less of a shit about the Sims themselves.

any rpg I can just grind the starting are y to max level, I do. otherwise I grind to max-reasonable level in each area before progressing.

I don't like to lose.

Oh man this made me dust off an old memory

There was a PS2 game my dad had called Dirt to Daytona. It's a racing game where you're supposed to play the career mode going from driving dirt track beaters to modifieds, trucks and finally becoming a pro nascar racer. You can tweak the cars, paint them, and try to get sponsors to fund you before your money dries up.

It was a cool game, but all I did was play the quick race mode. I would turn off all the caution flags and played it as a crash and pit manuver simulator lol

Not sure if this counts, because I'm not sure if there is a wrong way to play Fallout. I am going through New Vegas again, but for the first time in years. Completely disregarding the main storyline. Just wandering the Mojave, helping people as I go. Like David Carradine in Kung Fu. Mostly trying to do things peacefully, and gain as much karma as I can. Completely opposite of how I normally play Falmouth game. I need all that karma to offset how many people I've eaten, which is tremendous. Don't die around my character if you want an open casket. I gave myself lockpick and science skills via the command line, because this playthrough is about my interest in where the storyline take me, not about grinding to be able to open a lock.

Honestly, any “hard game”. I really love hard and challenging games but time isn’t in my favor (work, commuting and other responsibilities). So when I play a hard game (example Silksong) and I’m genuinely stuck, I’ll just use a Trainer or WeMod to get past it and after that stop using it and continue the game normally.

Quake / Quake World was really the epitome of "not how it was intended to be played". It introduced zigzag, wallhug and bunny jump through some clever exploitation of game mechanics, and completely changed its game play plus that of future fps games of the time. And people would just come up with stupid maps where you could do fps-parkour. I often did it myself for hours on end, just jumping around a map alone or with friends while chatting or listening to music.

A very short demo of how crazy it could get, speed indicator top right. 320 was the default movement speed.