This game could be your life

I bought Medieval II: Total War last summer, & I've not even loaded it up yet. I know it's supposed to be great, & at some level I want to play it (I bought it!). But having read the instruction manual a few times, & watched gameplay videos, I'm under the impression that if I want to enjoy this, or even finish a game or two of it, I'm going to need to commit serious time to this game: like hundreds of hours. & that's what I can't, or, better, don't want, to do. If I'm going to want to get into this game, it's going to have to be my life, & that's just not something I'm willing to consider.

When I first got into gaming, in the early 80s on the 2600, games weren't like this. I guess they could be: you could play Combat for hundreds of hours, but the depth wasn't really there. Once I started PC gaming in the mid to late 80s, games were more consuming: RPGs could last decent #s of hours, & goodness knows how much time I spend doing simulations in Earl Weaver Baseball, or constructing horrible jets in Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer. But this wasn't a requirement, & anyway it took obsessiveness to get into the games that way.

But I think at some point things changed---maybe with Civ? wherein games weren't simple affairs anymore. I'm interested if any of this rings true to any of you, & if so, what you think about it.

www.wowdetox.com

i think this is what i actually wanted out of a game?

whenever i have played a europa universalis game, whatever my initially strategy, i always end up trying the conquer the world by force. i remember having taken over mainland europe with austria and pushing simultaneously into britain, iberia, asia minor, japan and the americas - every turn took hours and i compulsively couldn't stop playing. but there has always been a tipping point for me where i got enough of a moment of clarity to realize that a particular game is just an elaborately disguised black hole for time and i got out.

I'm of two minds about this---on the one hand I seek games that are like this, but on the other once I get them I rarely play them.

I think for me the most dangerous allure is from grand strategy games...I bought Europa Universalis 3 when it was on cheap Steam sale earlier this summer. Of course I haven't even loaded it yet. At least with an RPG there's a story line that you want to play through once, & then you're finished, 50-100 hours in, no room for future improvement (I pretend for my mental health that it doesn't matter if there are different plot threads that I'd get if I played through again w/ another class or alignment).

i love the idea of games like this, especially like, playing them in the dead of winter, but i don't think i ever actually play them, favouring short bursty things so my life doesnt get totally sucked up

I guess the bottom line is "will you have fun?" Because if so, the question becomes "would you like to have fun for 100 hours?"

but then that's 100 hours i could also be spending doing other fun things. (and then we get back into the already discussed question of whether or not games are an intrinsically less valuable way of spending ones time).

i think that is kinda false, polyphonic. some fun is fun because it's not 100 hours long.

I keep thinking of that crazy Chrono Trigger post from a few years back, the one about spinal function: now there's someone for whom the game was his life.

My impression from posts on here is that these multiplayer war shooter games that keep coming out are pretty consuming people on there. Those are a pretty good example of what I'm talking about: to really enjoy that part of the game, I think, you really have to pour time into them; because otherwise you'll get eaten alive online.

Football Manager

xp

i dunno, i'm still in the lower ranks of Battlefield BC2, and I'm managing to hold my own against most of the superiors out there. That game is all about teamwork i admit.

xp

Fuck yeah Football Manager is a brutal time-devouring obsession or you don't play it at all

I poured so much time into getting good at Counterstrike that these days I'm reluctant to even *try* multi-player shooters as I know I can no longer put the same effort into not being shit.

with FM, unless your idea of fun is to spend 10 hours just to get til christmas of the first season, you commit or leave it out altogether

Largely inspired by the Run of Play Pro Vercelli thing, I have just recently bought my first FM since... the original CM3 I think. Which would have been while I was still at school and had a lot more free time.
I'm 9 hours in and I am indeed still some way off Christmas. Somehow though, the fact that it's a game on my laptop that I can play in between/instead of time spent on there on the internet anyway makes it feel much less of an obvious time drain than FFXIII or something that I have to make the effort to go and turn the console on, and I can't watch TV or listen to music at the same time or whatever. Maybe that's only because the addiction hasn't kicked in fully yet.

oh, it has. you're at self-delusion already!

(i used to play pro evo while waiting for cm4 to load)

but then that's 100 hours i could also be spending doing other fun things.

Psh

^