For me, the cost benefit is about entertainment. I recognize there have been studies that supposedly show that games can help develop or maintain certain skills, but for me it's more about learning the skill to experience the in-game reward. That's just for some games. For others, that element exists but the game is telling a story too. One that is punctuated by struggle, maybe battles, and the overcoming which leads to power ups and more story.

So the cost-benefit is that it costs time, but it pulls you out of end-stage capitalism and puts you in flow state, engaging in another world.

I would suspect, though, that if you're seeing video games through the lens of cost-benefit analysis, you might have trouble relaxing. People need rest.

Your 12 day old comment history is full of disingenuous bullshit, and so is this post.

For me personally, I tend to look at things in terms of costs and benefits. Through that lens, most games seem like a bad deal. In principle, I like some of the more quirky or esoteric ones, but it quickly seems like a lot to learn relative the payout.

This is where you lost me. The title of your post is about how you don't get "long" video games, then you go about costs vs benefits.

First I tend to dismiss any kind of correlation between how long a game is and how good it is. There are fantastic games on the shorter side. there are basically infinite games that manage to be engaging through and through. There are terrible games of all lengths that are full of boring padding.

But even seeing it through the cost vs benefit lens (in a kind of naive way), wouldn't it mean a longer game is more "worth it"?

And why is "a lot to learn" is listed as a negative? If you are enjoying what you're doing, you probably don't mind that it takes some time. If you don't, why are you playing that game at all? Games are not an investment. Like all entertainment media, engaging with them is supposed to be fun, or interesting, or evoking something you want to feel right now at least.

Regarding FPS, not sure where you got that idea. They've been common and popular for very long. Doom was a cliche image for the public representation of video games for a long time. Big FPS games (especially the military kind) have always sold like hotcakes and were long tied with sports games for "those games that are bought by people who don't play anything else". If anything, they've progressively lost a bit of ground to third person shooters, but they were always strong.

I'll bite. (Note I do notice you do have a 12 day old history, and we have had a wave of spammers trying to incite bullshit, so we'll see how this goes)

So, why play long games? Why read long books? Why watch long movies?

For me, I like a good well-told story. A game like Red Dead Redemption 2 has such a good story that it is worth investing 120 hours into. It's protagonist, Arthur Morgan, is so well written that he is arguably the most well-written fictional character of all time. Over the course of 120 hours you get to know him so intimately that you truly feel like you know and understand him, and over the story that will both make you laugh and cry, it culminates in an amazing climax, truly a story that could only be told over 100 hours.

To answer your other points:

For me personally, I tend to look at things in terms of costs and benefits. Through that lens, most games seem like a bad deal

This goes counter to what you said at the beginning, they are actually ridiculously cheap compared to other forms of media. Going to see a 2 hour movie now costs about $18 in the states, that's $9/hour. RDR2 was $60 and for only the first playthrough of 120 hours that's $0.50/hour of entertainment value. Now, take playing it multiple times and it's one of the cheapest forms of entertainment. (arguably the hardware to run it needs to be calculated in, but it depends on preferences etc etc etc)

When I was in HS, I had a band. Has that type of interaction simply been replaced by video games?

No. Apples and Oranges.

I really want to understand the interplay between video games and psychology.

I like good story telling. I like being enveloped in my media, and feeling truly immersed. Gaming does that in spades.

Cuz it seems like FPSes are dominant whereas not too long ago they were a single niche among many niches.

Maybe in your friend group they are, but in the circles I'm in it's simply not true. Everyone is different. Everyone has different preferences. I just played Dispatch over the weekend, a fun 8ish hour romp that also made me both laugh out loud and well up with tears, it was an adorable game. I see 98% positive ratings on it with almost 100k reviews, so I don't think we need to jump to "FPS is dominant".

I swear I’m not trying to troll

But you're doing it anyway. If you really are old enough to be posting "back in my days" shit on the Internet, then you must also be old enough to be able to reflect on what you're actually trying to say and start a discussion about.

Games, like any hobbies are done with whatever expendable income and time we have after everything else "important" is done. They are hobbies. Taste in this fleeting field of entertainment is just as personal and subjective as anyones taste in music. I'm pretty sure you know since you used to have a band in high-school after all.

So what exactly are you trying to say with your post? Why play long games? Because I want to. Just like you seem to want to troll people in this group.

If you're playing a game and enjoying it and it's long, you get to enjoy it for longer than if it was short.

Interesting. So where I think I don't like video games writ large, I may only resonate with particular genres or particular mechanics, etc(?).

That makes sense.

I further believe I see more sameness exist than actually exists because I simply am not as familiar with the subject matter.

Like anything its about how fun it is. Some people like to binge watch TV shows but thats some thing that I just can't do. I can do like an episode of one show and maybe one episode of another and then I'm itching to do something else. Where with something like fallout I can sit there and plan my base or several quests for hours. Or arc raiders I can do raid after raid and time could fly.

I generally game early morning between like 5-9am on weekends when the family is still asleep so I don't really feel like its wasting time, I'd just be sleeping otherwise

For me my favorite thing in games is exploring and being immersed in a world I could never experience in real life. Because of that I enjoy a lot of big open world games that do tend to be long. For me I really enjoy poking around and finding all the nooks and crannies, so having a big world with lots of that means more fun to be had!

because I like to

For video games I was a casual until I found a genre that clicked for me, and kept me wanting to go back to that world and gameplay formula. what keeps someone coming back will vary person to person, but for me in short it was a combination of the story, art direction and gameplay mechanics.

Before that I could get really invested in a game, but jumping to a similar one would easily burn me out. Finding your thing can take a lot of trial and error, and like you said for some people is just not worth the time / money investment.

It depends on the game, but i like long RPG's. Sometimes, it can start to wear out its welcome. But for the games where it works well it's cool. You get to experience this big world, usually going from a weakling to a strong character by the end. The stories can be really interesting (or bland too).

I recently decided that I am going to take on a game that could potentially take me hundreds of hours to finish and it's daunting, but if at some point if I start to hate it, I'll put it down and Google the results of the story and feel content.