gaffa2002 wrote on 2025-08-27, 00:08:

Today I deleted Knights and Merchants Remake from my PC. Its a great game and all, but the higher difficulty and the huge amount of time required for winning each mission (without abusing the AI at least) was causing me to stay too long in front of the PC, and was starting to get in the way of my daily tasks (i.e. work, house chores). I was able to get to the last mission of the main campaign, but the mission is quite long despite not being the hardest. Still, not being able to finish a level in one sitting, and being a strategy game, when I’m not playing I start thinking about strategies and I will resume the level next time, making me anxious to go back to the game and try again.
I remember doing that with a few other games in the past, like Street Fighter 5 (online play is too stressful) and ALMOST doing that to XCOM-2 (damn, this game got me hooked when I played it).
So, did you guys ever do that? Deleting a game that was taking too much space in your head even when not playing it?

Yes.
Some games require extended sessions that siphon your time like "where did those 4 hours go?".

Not delving into the psychological strategies behind some games but the effects are pretty blatant: wasting your life.
Some games are so frustrating to the point of building stress eventually vented in some maladaptive way.

Been there.

Back in my teens I would obsess over games, Squeezing in a bit of gameplay before school and spending as much time after school as I could.
Even at school I'd be thinking strategies to try once home. The original C&C and Red Alert would have been probably the worst for doing this.

I never deleted though, eventually I'd just move on to another game if I was stuck for too long. Often coming back a few months later and getting past the point I'd been stuck before.

These days I don't have the time or patience anymore. If I get even a little stuck I typically move on quickly to something else and will come back to it later.
I'm not sure if that better or worse really.

I avoided MMORPG games for many years because of this. I had some friends who were heavily into DAoC and watching them, I thought: "I don't want to be like this"

Then I got given a trial subscription of WoW.....

More of a rage quit. I used to play Il2 1946 almost every night after work, and quite a bit on weekends for years from about 2003 to 2007. I was a decent virtual pilot, but I only had dial up - it was surprising that it worked as well as it did, but voice comms were out of the question, so I played solo but always tried to assist anyone playing on the side I chose. What I came to realize was that most of the people playing only cared about other people on comms, and even if you were on the same side they couldn't be bothered to assist you if you weren't on their squad. I viewed it as a role where I would do anything to save a fellow virtual pilot on my side in much the same way an actual WW-2 pilot would have, but I was on servers with kids who just viewed it as another game. One evening I was shot down while others on my side could easily have assisted but couldn't be bothered, and that was the final straw. I stopped, and never went back.

in the star force days, damn right

Hollow Knight was too difficult and time consuming for me. I actually got some rsi related issues from playing too long and intensively. Also, while some what amusing at first, I believe World of Warcraft is ultimately pointless and designed to keep you hooked. No offense to anyone who likes to play it intended.

I think I've become less obsessive with games compared to my teens and the early 20s, these days I'll often just drop a game for good when I'm stuck or simply just bored -- you know, the kind of games that you might play along while it is running, but once you quit there's little incentive to go back. Sometimes these games sit on the HDD for a while because I keep telling myself I'm gonna play them more, sometime.

Last year I purchased Sacred Gold on a sale. I played the demo back in the 2000s and thought it was kinda cool, but even though I poured several hours straight into the full thing it ultimately felt like a waste of time and a completely shallow experience, not a true RPG to my understanding, so I uninstalled it without regrets. Generally, I try not to play after work (or) when I'm tired, it's no good way to relax anyway, even if a game is excellent in itself.

Back in the early-mid 2000s, I think I uninstalled Aliens versus Predator Gold once because I thought it was scary, but then I came back to it and played the heck out of all available game modes. Fun times. I think there might have been other examples when I thought I'd better uninstall a game rather than continue playing, but I can't immediately remember any more concrete details. I suppose it "helped" that I've also had more "creative" gaming obsessions like writing a campaign for StarCraft, or modding Dune 2, or aiding to make a fan translation & fan patch for Command & Conquer. Now, these things occupied a lot more of my time and thoughts (I can vividly remember thinking about Dune 2 day and night in the late 2000s), but were mostly rewarding overall.

Left League of Legends.. played it well for ~2 years then gave up as I saw how Riot consistently keeps changing characters and rules and introducing characters with crazy moves that leave all the legacy characters like stupid puppets. I figured they were making all this pointless, as the skill you develop would eventually become obsolete and you'll have to relearn things even for the same champ and even if the champ didn't change (e.g. items change or map changes...etc). What a waste of time...

wbahnassi wrote on 2025-08-28, 11:08:

Left League of Legends.. played it well for ~2 years then gave up as I saw how Riot consistently keeps changing characters and rules and introducing characters with crazy moves that leave all the legacy characters like stupid puppets. I figured they were making all this pointless, as the skill you develop would eventually become obsolete and you'll have to relearn things even for the same champ and even if the champ didn't change (e.g. items change or map changes...etc). What a waste of time...

Well, this is what happened to me with Team Fortress 2.
I started with 1st version (not beta), but later stopped because of new weapons that were better than vanilla ones.

I hate pay-for-better-than-all-others in-game transactions.
I played on some servers for a period and later lost interest when friends got bored as well.

Some had the great idea of acquiring a wife/husband and manufacturing kids...

Only game I ever remember specifically deleting from frustration was MTG: Arena. But that was more out of frustration with the game's direction at the time and questionable decisions by the developers. The final straw for me was when they started monetizing game modes. They already had monetized deck-building and cosmetics, but putting pay-gates on game modes was enough.

Yes, I've done this, though not becasue I felt anxious. I just needed more time. I've uninstalled many games simply becasue I don't have time to play them.

In fact, I used to play a lot of MMORPG games, but gave up on all of them a few years back. They are all filled with "time sink" content, and I simply don't have time to sink into them. I get it, they want to keep their players in-game. The more you're in the game, the higher the chance you're going to pay for more content. Games don't exist just for us to play, they exist to make money, even more so today.

In fact, I really only play one "online" game anymore, and that's Fallout 76. While it's maybe technically not an MMO, it is an online-only title. However, unlike most online-only games, it's not filled with those mandatory "time sinks". While there are aspects of the game that take time to complete, you can do almost all of them at your own pace. They give you plenty of time to complete those tasks in most all cases. Heck, there are times I only login for about 15 minutes, just to collect free things and maybe to my daily quests. They're so easy it only takes a few minutes to complete. It's one of those games you can play as much, or as little, as you want and not really miss anything. For these reasons, along with the fact my wife and I play together, and becasue the Fallout universe of games is one of my all time favorites, is why it made it past my personal "ban" on MMO games.

Like most other people, my time is limited. Outside of work, I've got things I need to do, as well as things I want to do. While there are days I can just sit and play Fallout all day, I often choose to limit my time in there so I can enjoy other games, work on projects, play around on my classic PC hardware, or just anything else I feel like doing. 😀

I don't think I've ever deleted a game because it was taking up too much space in my head. I have stopped playing games that I got bored with, or which had turned into unentertaining time sinks, or which were unpleasant. I'd probably uninstall these if they were download games from GoG or Blizzard etc.

But I haven't played games for a year or two. Nor uninstalled any for that matter. Last thing I played was a legacy WoW server, which eventually became a grind for me, and stopped being fun, so I stopped. I don't enjoy it when it turns into racing round areas as fast as you can, grinding the same place over and over for hours, multiple long lines of attunement quests, grinding materials for raids, ...

... damn, I can already feel the pull back to Azeroth... just going to have a quick look....

Constructor.

I just didn't get it. In the beginning it was fun, then all of a sudden it was game over. Tried it dozens of times, maybe it was a language barrier, I was about 10 years old. Still haunts me now and then, even some words which sounded a bit like my first language. "Hier Hein!" some hippy says all the time when directing him somewhere on the map. The characters have some made up language.

I'm a big fan of Acclaim Entertainment games, Turok, Forsaken, Xtreme-G 2, Re-Volt, etc... But this was something completely different.