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Comment by izackp | Hacker News Reader

Games are designed to be addictive, so once you stop its like quitting soda.. eventually you lose the taste for it.

Though, I noticed a lot of satisfaction from my life comes from interactions with others. Games no longer encourage quality interaction like they used to. Your friends get older then get married and get busy, so theres less of that. I usually analyze a game and decide if its wasting my time or improving my time on this earth.

Then there are the single player games. I feel like these had more meaning when the market wasn't as saturated. A lot of times you're just chasing nostalgia from that one really good game you've played. Hoping to recapture the same feeling. Not only that, most aaa games now days are now products of money instead of passion.

So if I had to guess why anyone stopped it's probably one of the reasons above.

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I think you've hit on a lot of good reasons that resonate with me in a fairly short comment; well done there. One point I'd elucidate on a bit:

> A lot of times you're just chasing nostalgia from that one really good game you've played. Hoping to recapture the same feeling.

I also think back to the 90's - the 8-bit NES was still kicking just about to be replaced by the SNES and by the close of the decade we had the Dreamcast and the N64 was already showing its age; it was a really incredible time of advancement (and I don't think that's all nostalgia from me as a kid at that time). That continued somewhat into the 00's, but really felt like it petered out since. I remember the sense of wonder at what could come next, and I just don't have that anymore.

> A lot of times you're just chasing nostalgia from that one really good game you've played.

I've just kept playing those really good games I found decades ago. For instance, I still play Master of Orion I and II on a regular basis.

The ability to continue to play games I purchased a lifetime ago is so important to me that I won't buy new games that rely on any external service to work. When I buy a game now, I want to reasonably expect that I can still play it 50 years from now.

Seems like many games require a connection to the server, even for solo play, or it's a download only. There's no market for used games since physical copies don't exist. There's only so much download space, and the game sizes are getting absurd in many cases.

I feel like many of the older ones weren't made to be addicting. Certainly some became addicting, but more as a side effect. Many didn't have online portions and could be beaten a few times and moved on. The ones that did have online portions had some things making them addictive, but not on the same level. Now the games seem mostly focused on online multiplayer. They require immense time investment to unlock things or level up, or you can pay money for a shortcut. There are constantly new things being released that you have pressure to buy or be left behind. It's very much designed to be addicting now, even if the game play, story, and social aspects have gotten mostly worse.

Only some games are designed to be addictive. Some are designed to be fun, but to be fair, you have to dig to find them.

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