[Felix]

I wonder if this is a common phenomenon, and playing Metro 2033 recently has put it firmly enough in my mind to want to ask:

are there are particular genres of games that really tire out your brains to a point where you can't play them for very long and/or you have to rest afterwards? Oddly enough, I have this with both cinematic single-player FPSes and cover shooters (Gears does it to me, as does Half-Life 2, but Halo and UT don't) as well as with word games (like Scrabble), though I can easily play more "complicated" tabletop stuff like Terra Mystica or Eclipse for hours.

these are probably two completely unrelated phenomena in my case, but I'm curious whether I'm the only one.

[Talbain]

I'm definitely in agreement with FPSes. Metro Last Light in particular just wore me out. You have to remain tensed up and be overly reactive, so it's hard to not be in this constant state of heightened awareness to even play the game. I think that's why the only FPS I play even a bit anymore is Bad Company 2 (and even then, only for maybe an hour or so). Those game stress me out, and while I feel the same high from playing a game like Mount & Blade Warband, the high has a less tense consistency to it. Feels like the difference between a marathon and a sprint, mentally.
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[Brooks]

All of them these days

Like the whole notion of playing a videogame to 'unwind' seems completely bizarre

[Felix]

[schroeder]

selectbutton.net
I always just figured that part is because I'm a snob who takes his hobbies too seriously though

[CubaLibre]

Tactical games like XCOM do this to me, but not grand strategy games like Civ, which I consider to be more chillout games, even at high difficulties. Go fig.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Felix]

yeah, see, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about

and fwiw I could easily play XCom or its ilk for like five hours at a clip if life didn't intervene and feeling good about myself afterwards wasn't an issue

whereas I can't play RTS games at all because they swing so far to the side of "tiring" for me -- way past FPSes, which I can usually appreciate -- that I don't find them at all fun.

[tacotaskforce]

I will never be able to complete Fatal Frame 1 because of this. No other horror game of any type, including other Fatal Frame games, has caused me that level of mental exhaustion to the point of collapse.
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[jodeaux]

Oh man, played the last 8 hours of Resident Evil 4 this weekend and I'm pretty mentally spent at this point. I started the game when it first came out but never finished it, but then I saw it was cheap on XBLA and told myself I was going to knock it out in a few intense sessions. It's definitely one of those games that demands you play IT, and IT only. Glad i finally defeated this game, but I'm legitimately weary.

[The King]

Multi-area puzzles; old adventure games and some survival horror games.
I can only play them in short bursts, being lost exhausts my brain really quickly.
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[Reed]

this

[Schwere Viper]

fighting games
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HeavyViper@Twitter ~~~ HeavyViper@Soundcloud
Blog: Machines That Sing

[kirby.png]

everything except fighting games
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@FinalArremer

[allensmithee]

really fast fighting games do this to me
like anything with a lot of crazy fucking juggling and shit
i dont play a lot of newer fighters as a result
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[Hojulas]

[Guillotine]

What I find exhausting at times is getting into a game. A game that begins tutorial-ish easily feels like work and might sour me out of gaming for a few weeks.

[Brooks]

[boojiboy7]

STGs would do this to me if they weren't so perfectly paced in small chunks/short play times to avoid it.

[Mikey]

[Ronnoc]

Horror games these days, and

[CubaLibre]

By contrast, shootmans are utterly breezy experiences for me. I think it's just because I have the most experience with them.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[TMFK]

[mauve]

I am unable to play fighting games vs anyone good continuously for more than an hour. It's almost exactly an hour too, my brain will just fizzle out and die and that's it. Speed of the game doesn't really matter but combo games are considerably easier for me to keep up with because you have to spend less effort focusing on your opponent. (which is also why I don't really enjoy playing them much!)

Back when I played shmups I could tell when I hit a hard limit by my brain sort of core dumping. "alright I just need to [fzzt] wait what where am i where are all the bullets help how do i move"

quality Doom levels get me the same way. have to spend a lot of time focusing on how to manage enemy movement and behavior in order to survive. love every bit of it, though. most FPSes just bore me instantly.

sufficiently hard puzzle games(as in, the ones you solve, not block falling/rising things) tend to satisfy me after an hour or two.
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[Talbain]

I really like shmups, but for whatever reason I tend to lose the planes/character/whatever frequently and so I usually put them down after a few playthroughs. I dunno if it's just a visual tracking issue or something else, but for whatever reason I lose the character even in relatively light shmups.
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[thecatamites]

As others said everything except really small freeware games, unobtrusive 3d exploration things, old 8bit RPGs like Dragon Warrior, maybe adventure games if I'd tried any of them recently.
Games that allow themselves to be taken as objects to be tinkered with at varying levels of focus instead of ones that assume a consistent level of effort and drive on the player's part as the water that makes the wheels go round, since it's just harder for me to raise the latter level of good faith for a videogame now. And ones with a more definite immediate sense of scope and context.
The Elder Scrolls and GTAlike games are weirdly exhausting to me considering they're just big playhouses... Is maybe awareness of discrepancy between the mechanics of playing them and the things that appeal to me about their setting, and the consistent low-level mental energy required to bridge that gap.
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[Broco]

Multiplayer traditional RTSes like Starcraft I find to be by far the most stressful and taxing game genre because of the sheer amount of unit micromanagement on multiple areas of the map and the need to think strategically even as you keep clicking frantically. Any game where you can focus on a single task at a time, no matter how difficult that single task is, I find relaxing in comparison.

[Kinto]

Puzzle games of the single-solution variety kill my brain, I didn't even get a third of the way through Fez. I love SpaceChem but I got pretty much nowhere in it!

For some reason Portal and Blip Blup are exceptions.

[mauve]

portal isn't a puzzle game, it's a pathfinding exercise at best. you rarely have to think more than 2 steps ahead for anything ever

still recommending drod for people who like puzzle games though

[Felix]

never found Drod (or SpaceChem) that likeable

Escape Goat 2 was excellent though

[rinv]

pretty much any game is like that for me at this point
i keep trying to play persona 4 and watch a few movies lately but just the thought of investing time into any kind of media immediately exhausts me

my "unwind" game now is just launch up spelunky on vita in bed and keep going for yama

[Felix]

that's actually why I hate modern jRPGs though, the notion of "investing time" weighs so heavily

my advice: play a different genre

[mauve]

'modern' jrpgs, starting around the ps1 era, decided story was more important than gameplay systems, so yeah i'm not surprised they moved well off into brain sponge territory. insert me trying to convince my doujin game making friends to tone down the cutscene dialogue just a little

drod is very.. unevenly paced, architect's/king dugan's have some serious problems with it in particular. they've improved this between games, jtrh is good and second sky is good, city beneath not so much.

nothing really ever drains me like a good fighting game set though, i am literally unable to think straight after an hour heh, it's just fuzz

also tired of sb logging me out every half day or so for the past several years

[RadRad]

I've been thinking about this, but I feel myself going through a change of "taste" as of late.
Past two years, I made it my mission to finish a game I started. If I had free time, its that game.
This contained a lot of action adventure games. Handheld or console, 10-20hrs in length.

I'm turned off by complicated systems, too much story or stressful action/puzzles now.

Recently, I've been super ADHD when it comes to "getting into a game", especially if I know there is a huge time investment involved.
Now I gravitate to what I like to call "disposable games".
Games I can pick up, play, enjoy and then turn off without really caring what I accomplished. I just like move around and input an action.
IE: Noby Noby Boy, Spelunky, Super Hexagon, Dots, Eliss Infinity, Tetris, WarioWare, Mega Man, Rhythm Heaven, Hohokum, older 2D Zelda entries, Fez, Lovely Planet, Animal Crossing, Proteus and Luftrausers. Mountain is a new favorite, for obvious reasons. ;)

But, I do go the opposite way- old JRPGS. Where I can, explore the "world", but there is an underlying quest. And in this case, I've been slowly treading through Dragon Quest I & IX and Earthbound, along with some Shin Megami Tensei IV. Which I've been playing since the start of this year.
30mins to an hour at a time, maybe sometimes more with the portables (which is my preferred way to play these), and just take my time and enjoy. I find the grind in these old games to be meditative. Attack, Magic, Item, and that's about it.
Explore, talk to strangers, and proceed with the story at my own pace.
Playing Earthbound, for the first time, and I think I finally found my favorite game of all time. The world, music, and action is just perfect for whatever pace your going at. I don't have to think about where to go next, or complicated battling/job systems. I just do. Kind of like a book.
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[username]

Horror games, even if I don't find them particularly scary, have a habit of me only being able to play them in 30 to 45 minute intervals before my brain just gets tired of the exercise.

A wide variety of strategy games also just wear on me to the degree that I can rarely make any progress. This actually ties into something a bit different though as I... can't handle games where you can make a poor decision or choose the wrong path that can screw you up to the degree that you might not be able to salvage the run and have to start over. That eats a ton of mental energy and usually results in me just walking away and playing something else. I don't think I ever made it past the screen in God Hand that wanted me to create my own combo...
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[MattCD42]

It's funny a lot of why I had to put metro down after awhile was the fact I found it so wearing. With the bullets being currency I found every section so stressful it wasn't much fun to play, but it was so good!
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[mauve]

playing roguelikes for awhile will cure you of any unwillingness to burn everything you have when opportunity arises

horror games have basically zero effect on me. they're never scary, they sometimes startle, and that's about the limit of it. i get kinda bored of it. i would be a _terrible_ let's player of them unless i was trying to make a mockery out of it.
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twit

[Rud31]

Strategy games of RTS/SRPG/Civ/TBS all stripes stress me the heck out. Not so much tiring but I just cannot mentally handle them anymore. It's not execution. I can handle any game that hands me the abilities to win and tells me to be radical for gains. Any game where there is the meta-game of needing to level all your units (usually by delaying a win condition) or managing resources or making sure everything has the best armor and is in the best category and are you following the proper strategy for this situation aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Anytime a game becomes about creating the conditions to win as opposed to execution. I really liked the first 5 hours of Jeane D'Arc. Then suddenly the was a "boss" battle and clearly I was supposed to either restart the game and have my characters hit each other, or play a bunch of filler battles to get my characters up to the level they need. Shining Force 1 is almost an exception to this because it is very very linear and just about going battle to battle. I keep meaning to try 2 and Gaiden but keep delaying that. 3 seemed much more influenced by other Tactics games towards the metagame.

So I tend to stick to games that ask me to be hard and tough.

Fighting games (particularly because I am very very bad at them) tend to burn me out after an hour. I know practice will make me get better. It isn't that losing burns me out, it's just that I feel my possibility of success is so low. I've had the same feeling with counter-strike even playing it for 10 years but my crew playing every night means i'm playing every night so the one FPS I am no good at I am finally getting good at. Then you get called an incredibly horrible yet unoriginal name and really want to stop playing.
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[The Blueberry Hill]

I can't think of any that I actually find exhausting, but plenty that make me feel anxiousness about playing. I even got anxious about playing Proteus. I made a list of games I don't feel anxious about playing, then realised their common thread was that I was already very familiar with all of them (Warframe, Minecraft, any Picross game, my own things), though that familiarity shifts.

I guess only give most games half my attention, though. Now I use them more like thinking aids, something to do while my mind wanders, something to wake up my brain in the morning. I guess that's why I don't find them exhausting? I also like making deliberately not-attention-holding things that I hope encourage mind wandering. That's generally how art I like functions. Like thecatamites I mostly like toylike things. And also making games into toylike things.

Hmmm. I could play shootinggemu all day and they take all my attention, or they do some kind of full attention / no attention magic thing.




This thread is a nice alternative, or add-on, to the 'introductions' one.

[GrimmSweeper]

Twitch FPS will make me slightly nauseous after a while if I'm physically tired, but I can burn through several hours of that style of play otherwise. The very thought of horror games being a tense, draining experience just turns me off playing them entirely; I have owned Silent Hill 3 for several years but never felt the urge to play it. Part of it is hardly being exposed to horror in general so I imagine I have a sensitivity to things other people would not even jump at. Non-twitch puzzle games tend to burn me out relatively quick, the time it takes decreases when I get stuck on one aspect for a long time.

[Zmann]

[Felix]

wow, we are opposites!

it's OK though because I love Cosmic Encounter too.