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There's an indie game called Deep Sixed that felt this way for me. The plot is that you're a prisoner and your cell is a spaceship that gets moved around for va

• godot 5y ago
  Do you think your age and life (work) experience did that for you? I have noticed myself feeling considerably differently towards different games too. Games I used to enjoy (like Starcraft) back in the days, I enjoy a lot less as an older guy now and having worked for almost 2 decades. It takes a lot of mental effort to keep up and do well (macro-ing and managing my econ, also micro-ing my army, etc.). Whereas if I play some Fortnite with friends (as a 40 year-old...) it's just pretty relaxing overall and I still enjoy gaming that way.
  • pugz 5y ago
    That's an interesting comment. I loved Starcraft as a kid. Played many hours every day. I'm now 33 and never got into Starcraft 2. Nowadays the idea is utterly unappealing. I just play the occasional Call of Duty Warzone (similar to Fortnite) and it's fun.
  • Falkon1313 5y ago
    I feel the same. Starcraft used to be what I would consider a 'light' game. As a teen I got big into the grognard strategy wargames, the kind with over 1000 units and >300 page rule books and very detailed simulation of everything. That and 4X games like Civilization and Alpha Centauri. So much planning and managing and problem-solving through epically long and large games. Nowadays, in my 40s, it's things like Fortnite (my current favorite), Subnautica, and European/American Truck Simulator. Games where I can just relax and play and not have to do much thinking.
  • geocrasher 5y ago
    That's a great question. It was work experiences that transformed a challenge into a stressful slog. There are some things in my work history that elicit a PTSD-like response. For example, right now I'm thinking of a software product that I used to have to administer on about 60 servers, and I can feel myself tightening up and almost feeling nauseous. This isn't related to my original comment but answers your question I think. My work experience definitely informed my preference toward games. I like problem solving and expressing creativity. But doing so under pressure is the opposite of fun for me, which is why that game was no-go for this greying geek.
• 0des 5y ago
  Which servers are you responsible for? Just curious
  • imdsm 5y ago
    Look for the smoke. Those.
    • 0des 5y ago
      haha That was funny
  • geocrasher 5y ago
    I work in the web hosting industry. At one point in my career I was answering social media and taking the technical lead in fixing minor server issues. There's a reason I call Twitter "The Little Blue Bird of Hate."
    • 0des 5y ago
      That is a lot of pressure. Glad you made it out of that spot.
      • geocrasher 5y ago
        Agreed, and Thanks! :) Me too. To be fair even at that employer it was a temporary thing, mostly because of the amount of stress it caused.
• adamc 5y ago
  We can learn a lot from digging into our stress responses. Changing it is much harder, but learning is a start.
• Aeolun 5y ago
  > While you're busy putting out fires, please don't forget to buy new parts, to continue your assigned mission and if you could also take care of those aliens attacking the lower ring that would be lovely. Hmm, yeah. I wonder where I’ve heard that before.
• lijogdfljk 5y ago
  Satisfactory and Factorio do that for me. Really good games but i can barely bring myself to play them with how quickly they start making me feel like i'm working. Wish there was an.. easy mode, or something. Something that let me enjoy that feeling of my work - which i love - but with some simplifications to not exercise the same parts of my brain i'm trying to rest after a long days actual work hah. Who knows, maybe it would be boring :shrug:
  • ummwhat 5y ago
    "'just enjoy it and don't think' is for those who don't understand what a joy it is to think." If you're the type of person enjoying a game that is like work but without productivity, "fun" and "mindless" are contradictory attributes. Don't fight yourself. The thinking is the enjoyable part.
  • RangerScience 5y ago
    For Factorio: 1. Turn off biters (or turn on "peaceful mode", which mostly lets you ignore them until you want to start dealing with them) 1a. Dragon's Teeth wall design 2. Grab one of the quick start mods so you start with a backpack of construction robots 3. City blocks After that it's down (and up) to you. I've been able to play Factorio like it's I'm gardening - where I'm just chilling, poking at the puzzles - and other times I haven't been, even when I've got the biter problem resolved, and I'm doing what you described.
    • animal531 5y ago
      I think for a lot of games it helps to tune them the way you want to play. For Factorio I like to turn the biters to easy mode, add some convenience mods like ranged grabbing etc. But after that I like to "speedrun" the game to see how quickly I can launch the rocket. My best time is only about 11-12 hours, so it's far off any kind of world record time, but it makes the game a lot more fun when I have a goal in mind, instead of just endlessly optimizing etc.
    • Dylan16807 5y ago
      I don't know, I would expect turning off biters to make the temptation for hardcore optimization much worse! They add chaos and something else to focus on and if they're making things too hard then you can adjust the difficulty.
• technofiend 5y ago
  Lost Ark was recently released into the US market by Amazon / Smilegate and is getting some negative feedback due to the casino-like elements to the game. Some people just don't want a slot machine simulator, but if you're the publisher who wants to extract maximum revenue from players, then Skinner boxes are apparently the way to go. The player can buy their way past randomness by either purchasing material that increases their chances of winning, or gives them more chances to play. So despite complaints I doubt that mechanic will go anywhere.
• digitallyfree 5y ago
  MMORPGs can also give you this stress, especially ones where you are invested heavily into the experience. Spent some time on a MUD with actual roleplay and permadeath where people were crazy to the point where some would do all-nighters for intelligence stakeouts, battles, and other events. Many of the team leaders also set up a "hot pager" system so they could be quickly reached to assist while they were offline. In moments when my character was near death I was often panicking and really feeling the tunnel vision of combat stress. The stakes were high in that a character and assets you spent over a year developing could be wiped out in an instant if you lost your focus. Eventually I couldn't take it and stopped playing. On the other hand, there are games that are just straight up work - EVE is an example (haven't played it myself but do know people who do) and Rimworld if you play with an optimization/perfectionist mindset.
  • oblio 5y ago
    I played Dota for more than 10 years. Besides the fact that I now have RSI (maybe not just due to Dota, possibly due to time spent in front of screen, overall), I realized after a while that I was a sort of people manager for 12-18 year olds and maybe I could just do the same thing at $DAYJOB and end up getting paid better :-)
    • nicoburns 5y ago
      One of the bizarre parts of these games is that you can effectively become a people manager as a 12-18 year old.
      • duskwuff 5y ago
        And if you're good enough, you can even get paid for it. (Not well, mind you...)
        • hprotagonist 5y ago
          and historically, hired at Yahoo when that meant something.
• rob74 5y ago
  I felt this way about an indie game that was actually very well received (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_Metro_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_Metro_(video_game)), and it was fun for a while, but it quickly grew old: the graphics are rudimentary (not expecting AAA-level stuff of course, but still, simple monochrome vector graphics get boring pretty fast), the gameplay is wildly unrealistic (stations popping up out of nowhere that you have to connect to lines which you can instantly change, even erase and rebuild everything, ad infinitum, trains that can be instantly teleported to a completely different line when needed etc.), and every game inevitably gives you a sense of failure, because sooner or later your network is swamped with passengers and collapses. So not really realistic, but the need to constantly optimize the network while the game keeps throwing spanners in your works quickly felt like drudgery. For some time I kept coming back because of the daily challenges and other stuff designed to keep things interesting, but after about one month I decided enough is enough and uninstalled it.
  • animal531 5y ago
    I enjoyed both Metro and the newer Motorways. But inevitably I uninstall them when you realize that at some point at your skill level it just becomes luck as to what items pop out where. With great luck you can easily double the score on a bad luck map.
  • ninjaz 5y ago
    I enjoyed the game for a short while too, I was taking it as having some resemblance of urban planning for the real cities, and getting to redesign some of the terribly inefficient system of cities that I've lived in and others that I greatly admire and try to emulate. Later I just found this is almost random and has not much to do with the actual traffic flow of those cities, it just became an optimization game with increasing difficulty level. That's when I started feeling the "work" element and never went back.
  • ace2358 5y ago
    Agreed. I stopped playing that yesterday when I realised the level for my city had nothing to do with my city. Kind of put me off all Apple Arcade games honestly.
• phaedrus 5y ago
  In a life imitates art moment, I watched the story from the trailer for that game (the character ends up in the cell after being held criminally liable for a mistake at work due to complacency), and then saw this headline in another open browser tab: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/03/25/1088902487/former-nurse-found-guilty-in-accidental-injection-death-of-75-year-old-patient https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/03/25/1088902...
  • stickfigure 5y ago
    My wife (who is an experienced nurse) told me about that case this morning. She has mixed feelings, but is not terribly sympathetic. This person should not be working in the profession, that seems clear. In jail, I don't know. Is there such a thing as "criminally incompetent"?
    • smolder 5y ago
      If you deceive people into giving you responsibilities you're incapable of dealing with, and it brings meaningful harm to others, it can be criminal. There are regulations for legal, medical, and financial services to criminalize that deceit and prevent that kind of situation.
    • phaedrus 5y ago
      Why is the nurse criminally negligent, but not the company or programmers which made the software that runs the automated medicine cabinet? Or the hospital administration who failed to recognize and do something to correct the systemic problem of why constant "overrides" are needed to complete normal tasks? Edit: maybe drug companies are even partly responsible for confusing names & the whole system of generic versus trade names (as it seems this incident wouldn't have happened if the generic name were the only name by which the substance was known). I'm not saying any of the above should be. I just think we should compare and contrast the medical profession with aviation. The reason the accident rate is so low in commercial aviation is a systems approach to safety. In the medical profession it's all about machismo and individual responsibility - which doesn't lead to continual improvement as an industry.
• dclowd9901 5y ago
  My experience with an all-stress game is Papers, Please. Between the pressures of the government bureaucracy, the time stressor and the plight of the poor people you have to crush... it's exhausting.
  • laristine 5y ago
    Crushing poor people was the reason I quit that game and some similar other games.
• MarcelOlsz 5y ago
  Holy shit this is exactly what I'm looking for! Thanks.
• microtherion 5y ago
  Somewhat related, I remember Space Colony, where you had to manage an eponymous Space Colony, which not only involved assigning jobs to people, but also looking after their mental health.
  • ethanwillis 5y ago
    This was one of my favorite games as a kid. I don't even want to think about how many hours I put into it.
• jnsie 5y ago
  I feel this way about a lot of games, to be honest. There's so much side-quest filler that feels like work to me (a first play through of one of the Far Cry games had me crafting a wallet or some such nonsense) that it's become quite off-putting. As a teenager with nothing but time, I probably wouldn't have cared, but as a grown man with a full time job and little time to spend on video games, the last thing I want to do is feel like I'm working.