I think it comes down to just knowing what is good. When you're young you don't have any experience to judge quality by. As you get older you can rapidly assess that something sucks, even if other people are pumping it up. Either in terms of gameplay or plot or whatever, now you have standards. Also, a lot of modern games just don't respect your time, and as you get older you realize your time is valuable so you just don't have the patience for that.

I'm in my 30s, I still game, but I'm a lot quicker to just go "this sucks" and move on to something else.

I kinda need to be in the mood to play a game. Usually, once I finally start playing something, it's easy to keep going. But sometimes I'll have to be pretty bored before I'll play a new game. I still haven't played RDR2, but I seem to be more eager to play metroidvanias and PS1-style indie horror games.

Play whatever you enjoy. Maybe you feel like you don't have the time to sit down and invest yourself in a story die to other commitments like work or family. That's normal.

It's your free time. Gaming should be a fun hobby, not a chore.

Wish more games would have a "I have not played this in a month and need a quick recap" mode.

I don't enjoy gaming anywhere near as much as I used to, and a lot of AAA games just don't appeal to me anymore.

Indie games are where I get most of my enjoyment from gaming now and looking forward to Jusant, and the DLC for Lake in November. But apart from that, I'm not really fussed.

I've recently completed Metro Exodus, DLCs included. I have most of the achievements, but it don't feel like getting the remaining ones at the moment. Before that I completed all of the Halo games compatible with the XB360, on coop.

I feel lost. I don't really know what to play now.

I went back to playing some Insurgency coop, but it wasn't even too engaging before.

Yup. My first console technically was a NES (technically Atari 2600 but I was really young). Been playing console and PC games ever since. I used to love games. Wanted to design them and even got a job as a game tester and GM for WoW (tester made me realize I didn't want to work in the industry). I don't know when it started but outside of a few instances I can't get into games anymore. I think there are a few reasons (though they're sort of overlapping).

• I've already experienced a lot of it. I've saved countless kingdoms, stop hundreds of bad guys from blowing up stuff, repeatedly discovered the mysteries of crystals/labs/villages. There isn't a lot of "new" stuff.

• I don't have consistent chunks of free time and don't want to use all my freetime playing games. I can't always invest in a long story and a lot of games take a while to get started.

• As I get older I value my time more. I'm not necessarily old but looking at life expectancy I've hit the midway point. That just causes me to evaluate my freetime differently. Unfortunately that doesn't mean I am necessarily making the best of use of my time but stops me from spending 8 hours of a Saturday playing the new Spider-Man.

• I find my need to unwind and relax increases with age. After a long stressful day at work I don't necessarily want to engage with complex systems or drawn out stories. I just want to start playing and not have to think. I also don't want to be stressed. I find online competitive games to be stressful.

There are other issues like the market has changed and less games align with what I enjoy. Social aspect of games are mostly gone for me.

Damn you fromsoft, ive gone hollow

I’ve lost all patience for gaming. I tried play one of the Wolfensteins a few weeks ago. The beginning of the game is basically on rails, and I was required to put out a fires or something, I was like, uh I just want to shoot some fake people, to hell with this.

Agreed that it’s harder now that we’re older, especially if you work a lot or have kids/family responsibilities.

The most rewarding aspect of playing a game these days (IMO) is the social aspect of it. Whether that be playing with friends or sharing a ‘physical’ neutral space with other players like in an MMORPG. If you have a friend or a group of friends it’s fun to start random games together and experience them with someone. If you’re a solo gamer you need a much greater reason to start a new game, which is harder as you’ve described.

I don’t have many friends who game consistently, so I’m basically left to choose between going back to an MMORP like WoW (ugh), which after a while you realize is still lonely unless you really invest in making friends on your sever, or playing a new game at launch. Even if it’s a single player game there’s a lot to be said about playing a new game as soon as it releases. You get that collective sense of community because everyone is going in fresh and finding out secrets and solutions and sharing them with each other online. It doesn’t feel like you’re totally alone, and although it’s short lived it can feel rewarding. It’s like watching a weekly release show and joining in post-episode discussions online. You can’t recreate that experience after the fact.

My taste in games has changed a lot over the years - I think to help accommodate adult life. As my time has gotten more spoken for I look for games that can quickly be picked up and put down. And as I've become more bitter and misanthropic, I've largely given up on multiplayer (except Tertis 99!). Basically things I can play when I've got any amount of downtime and I don't need to follow a story line, or disappoint other people, or watch cut scenes, or even have my volume up.

I'm really into colony sim / base building / and automation types games now. Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, and if I go more than 3 days without playing Oxygen Not Included I start to get the shakes. I also like low key survival games like Don't Starve, Astroneer, and No Man's Sky.

I've been playing (and enjoying) BG3 but I don't have enough time to get immersed so I'm still in Act 2 on my first play through.

Modern AAA games? Yeah. But many smaller and indie games are still good. I loved Ion Fury and Turbo Overkill. Some of the best games in the past 5 years imo.

Yup. Used to be it was quite easy to find the games that were worthwhile to play since there was very little for profit games and not too much choice. Nowadays only if I hear from people I trust to have a taste for the games I want to play will I actually get excited. Its just easier to go back to classics because you know you're going to have a better time than most things you buy new.

Always on the look out though, gems are still being produced, they just became a lot less findable.

I did video games professionally for ten years (grew up on the ZX81, C64, Amiga) and since then I have a hard(er) time because the only things that changes in new games is :

A) better graphics (potentially)

B) The back-story

I don't really care for A, and for B it's kind of scarce... I only need to save the world of kill the dragon so many times.

I did a 180 and learned chess which I feel wildly rewarding!

I'm also making a "slow game" (12 "action points" every like 12h, fantasy settings) that you can play for 5 minutes a day, but can be really immersive (it's text only).

I don't really know what I wanted to say here, but I too hope I'll find some new breathtaking game :-)

I think something people haven't mentioned yet is that games are so much a digital media now that where I used to be able to keep infinity games at all times in a CD book, I now have to selectively decide which games get to occupy my limited hard drive space, and installing a new one means uninstalling another, and waiting to redownload it, and between my limited drive space and less than amazing network speed, those can absolutely influence what I'm able and willing to play at any given time.

It's more logical to keep ten games I know I like installed rather than choose one of those to cut off in place of a new unknown quantity.

Also, compared to other major sentiment I see in this thread, I actually quite like tutorial sections of games. I'm often very interested to see what the game itself has in store in terms of exactly what mechanics and systems it contains and how they execute them, and how that stacks up compared to reviews or word of mouth, which are often vague, biased, or missing portions of the experience.

After I fully understand what a game is trying to do, I fall off the wagon often times as it sinks into a routine instead of a novel learning experience, or maybe I actually love it, but standards continue to increase as more and more novel ideas and fusions of genres are created and become existing products. It becomes more difficult to make something that's not something you've already done, but slightly worse or only slightly better.

I still "get into games" plenty, but it doesn't happen quite as often, and it's the "sticking with" them that becomes more desired and elusive.

A lot of modern games definitely don't do story well. The amount of times I download a game for 10 mins of exposition before starting or not getting to play while the game tells rather than shows is outrageous.

The perfect game for me would start immediately and have any exposition happen via audio while being able to play the game.

The only thing that makes it hard for me is shitty monetization, and the knowledge that all online games are subject to getting OW2'd

Yeah. I have lots of games in my steam library but I only play tf2 lol

Make it an appointment. Get ready to play the game on Saturday at 09:30 and stick with it until 15:30 give it 6 hours of your full attention. No phone within reach. Make sure to get the housework done by that so you can stay longer. That worked wonders for me. Oh, and play older games. I never played xbox360 or PS3 games (only CoD couch coop with friends) because I had a Wii and only recently got an old PS3 and the games are amazing.

The older I get the more I know what kinda games I'm into. So everything else I try to play just feels boring very quickly. I get bored very quickly in general if I don't keep a game fresh for myself by, for example, mixing main and side quests instead of doing just one for hours.

I've also had times when I didn't play any video games at all and just watched YouTube all day. And sometimes I felt like I played games just because I didn't have anything better to do.

At the moment, I basically just play Cyberpunk and Battlebit, because both of those offer various ways of approaching encounters.

I'd be playing a lot less I suspect, if I didn't get into simracing. Nowadays it's that and a roguelike FPS for in-between.

Tastes change. What are you in to now?

(Almost) 40 year old gamer here. Eh... it depends of my mood and how "new" the game feels. But I find easier to settle in PvP-oriented games tho.

Happened to me where I felt loss if enjoyment over any game, that it felt like a waste of time and a chore. That eventually passed, definitely find them fun again.

I feel like a lot of games these days make it difficult to get into, ironically by trying too hard to make it easy to get into, with excessive tutorialization. Part of it might also be the types of games that you like. For example, I want to play a game to have fun and challenge myself, not to sit around watching a story play out for a half hour while I walk around doing nothing. So the majority of popular games that people are always talking about are the kind of games that I would absolutely hate. I want to just jump in and play. The new Super Mario Wonder game is a pretty good example of something that just gets out of your way and lets you play the game, so I have been enjoying it quite a bit for the past few days. The recent F-zero 99 is also an enjoyable racing game for me, for the same reasons. I have also been getting into fighting games more in the past few years, so I've been playing Street Fighter 6 a lot.

So the most important thing I have learned, is that I can no longer just look at which games are considered "good", because in many cases I'm going to hate them. When I was younger, I would love just about any of the popular games. But now, I know what I like, and that's what I gravitate to.

Come and goes for me, I try to play only one RPG or adventure type game at a time to remain hooked to the plot, several hours into Final Fantasy 8 on steam at the moment, played Xenogears on my steamdeck using emulation before it. I'm in my thirties for reference.

When you're young, you're often engaging in a common animal behavior known as "play". This is essentially practice-mode for life, where you physically or mentally act out a lot of the abstract ideas you've been learning about over the years. This is critical, because our abstract ways of understanding and communicating advanced concepts are still fundamentally incomplete. You can, for instance, teach a kid to be honest, that honesty is important, etc. But then they get into a school environment, surrounded by real life situations. Will honesty always benefit them, like a "good" thing is supposed to? No.

Our abstract understanding of honesty and its importance is one thing. Putting it into effective practice is another, and fundamentally circumstantial.

"Play" is how animals bridge these two things with personal experience, while hopefully avoiding the consequences of actually trying for real and potentially having an accident. Like, an animal could abstractly learn about hunting by observing its mother. But until it actually physically practices these skills, it will be very bad at them. Us learning about "the importance of honesty" is no different.

Humans have a vastly, exponentially greater number of abstracts we're required to understand in order to be effective citizens of the modern world. We tackle them in the same way, though, with play. Play, is practice.

So, if play is practice in an attempt to bridge some kind of abstract, incomplete learning, then what do you have to gain at this current phase of your life, from this "play"?

Your subconscious gets this. You don't need to play anymore, you're good enough for the real thing. So, why should your brain want to play at something? Especially when getting older also makes it clearer just how much incorrect information is being taught in gaming. Like, how many people try to use their CoD experiences to understand the Russo-Ukrainian War?

Anyways, it's complicated.

edit: Thinking further on this, I would propose the following: In the same way that horniness is the mechanism by which your genes make you reproduce them, and hunger is the mechanism it employs to make you fuel their work, "fun" is the mechanism by which your genes make you practice whatever skills or experiences might improve your chances of passing them on, in an environment where it is safer to do so.

This is why play gets fundamentally less fun as you get older. It begins to lose its purpose, outside of handing those skills, and the techniques for practicing them, on to the next generation. We prefer to go back to those same games we played though, because we're refining the lessons we learned from them. This has an evolutionary benefit as well, actually, as even our methods of "play" can be improved through long enough practice and iteration. These refined methods of play can then be handed down instead, which will likely be more efficient than previous iterations.

I have noticed it's been harder and harder to find something I want to play. I've gone down both my Steam library and my wishlist going "No...no...no...god no..."

A lot of my games that I thoroughly enjoyed in the past but I am done with. These include the entire Half Life franchise, Kerbal Space Program and I think Stardew Valley. Loved those games, played the hell out of them, will probably not launch them again.

A lot of games I've found diminishing replay value. Like I feel like I've mastered Subnautica, having done a number of self-imposed challenge runs like baseless vegetarian.

Talking about "story" makes me want to fuss about Tears of the Kingdom. This game doesn't have a story; it has an anecdote at best. It's amazing how far they stretched so little over absolutely nothing. They wrote so little plot for this game that they couldn't come up with four different cut scenes for the defeated the bosses sequences. It's a genuinely amazing piece of craftsmanship, the amount of hard work that went into the art and engineering that is that game is an astounding achievement but wow I don't like playing it, and I think, for the first time since I was 5 years old, I'm not going to buy the next Zelda game.

It's been awhile since I've come across something new that makes me think "yeah I want to play that."

Have you ever run out of Youtube to watch? Like there's just nothing you're interested in on there? It feels like that but bigger.

I stopped buying games after I noticed I still only open my typical three :/
Also is a good way of saving money :)

This is how I am with books. I have Starters Anxiety

Idk man the updates to games I've played for years get me very excited.

Playing other games? Why though.

Most of my friends don't play video games anymore but I love em more than when I was a kid. Like in school I had no time to play but now I can work from home and I can automate lots of it so plenty of time for hobbies.

The only issue is my tastes are rather niche, I think I finished every story and choice focused RPG where you make your own character. I do like games like Stardew Valley or Minecraft and I play those while a new RPG comes along.

I have too much other shit going on and can't mentally set it all aside any more which keeps me from getting immersed in games. There's just always something else in the back of my mind I'm also thinking about when I'm trying to play. I try getting everything done first so I can concentrate but there's just so much.

Hmm, this is an interesting one.

I rarely play alone anymore. Which makes it even more difficult as you get older. It's hard to match up with other people when life keeps them equally busy.

I've also noticed that I want a new experience from my games, kind of like searching for that new movie. Games rich in their story and yet not that distracted in side quests seem to keep me going. God of War was ideal, Horizon too. Baldurs Gate 3 had me for a while, but most online titles suck the time out of me at almost no return.