Does anyone actually find video games boring and a waste of time? And by extension gamification of anything is not a motivating drive? Every ADHD advice usually centres around some form of gamified strategy but to me this is flawed. How do you manage dopamine without it being gamified?
It’s very rare that I can find myself engaging with any video games these days and it’s usually down to a few reasons:
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The gameplay is something that I recognise the mechanics of and feel like I’m playing something I’ve already played and once I recognise it there’s little reason to continue. Completion or challenge of the game is not a motivating factor to stick with it.
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I have so many things that I need to be doing that I can’t even do and anything not on the list and video gaming is a waste of that time that could be going to literally anything else.
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Narratives in games are… not that interesting. I usually find the balance between interactivity and story always off and any gameplay is either boring or the narrative is boring so one is always cancelling the other out, so “engaging” with a story is cumbersome and at that point I may as well watch a passive form of media.
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Online multiplayer is rarely fun as I have little time to invest in being any good at a game to the level I can enjoy it. Usually the enjoyment comes from making other people’s lives miserable by beating them.
Oh and forget about achievements, they are just a bunch of todo items that I can’t process at all as they are either micro indicators of progress in the game and useless eg. You do literally nothing aside from play the game as intended and you get some achievement. Or it’s some ridiculous set of tasks that I get task paralysis by which in the end there’s zero reward for accomplishing so why bother.
My favourite type of game is turn based, with semi random/procedural generation of many elements of the gameplay, whether it be characters/map/team composition etc. The randomness is what lets me keep going and feeling like its new. The mechanics aren’t new, but the application is
So, essentially, board games.
Nope, boardgames are too “fixed”. Think more like X-com, turn based roguelikes, iron man crusader kings, deck builders where you can’t choose the same cards every game etc… ie, games where the rules and combinations are always changing, so you can learn the system, but you need to apply that knowledge each game, rather than just learning to hyper-optimise a specific strategy by repetition.
I’m not sure what you’re familiarity with board games is, but there are a lot out there that do exactly that. Might be worth looking into! There are digital versions of a ton that you can try on boardgamearena.com
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Yeah, I’m familiar. I’ve got more hours wracked up on Rallyman GT than I want to admit, and I own a lot of boardgames!
But I was talking about single player computer games, and didn’t want to complicate the analogy. Most board games only avoid the problems I was talking about, by dint of being multi player, and introducing the unpredictability factor through other people. But when we’re comparing single player computer games to board games, the analogy gets messy if the board games assume multiplayer. And I even acknowledge that there are single player board games that can scratch the itch (Final Girl, I’m looking at you), but for someone who doesn’t already play board games, it’s a big reach.
But yeah, the length of that paragraph is why I just skipped over boardgames in my previous reply :)
Fair enough. You never know who thinks board games are just monopoly, but I’ll sit down and shut up now.