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Comment by jomohke | Hacker News Reader

As someone who's not really a gamer, hearing "it gets tiring after 85 hours" as a negative blows my mind. 85 hours!

I've racked up over 900 hours on Team Fortress 2 and I'm still terrible at it.

I also wonder what I would have learned or built in the time that I've played that game.

Were those really high-energy hours of your life that you really could have put in building something instead? Or have you actually gotten 900 recovery, low energy, brain dead hours out of it?

I have played over 4000 hours of Team Fortress 2, and I can say with complete certainty that you have no idea what you are talking about.

What? So were those hours you could have worked or do you think they were better spent relaxing and low-energy?

What does you having more hours have to do with it?

I think you’re telling this as a negative but I think the above poster meant it as a positive. Low energy = relaxing, even if mentally stimulating.

what video game is low energy brain dead? they are designed to do exactly the opposite. sure, you may be sitting stationary in a chair/couch, but the endorphin rush from the game play is exhausting.

Lots of video games are low energy. Idles and incrementals, certainly. But I find things like Diablo to be pretty relaxing (or at least I play it that way), and tons of others. I can't really get into the FPS games anymore just because they _do_ require so much energy and attention.

i guess it's different for different people. for me, regardless of the game play type, it's exhausting. I can watch TV without issue, but playing games strains my eyes much much more than TV viewing. after an hour playing, i have to stop

I have the opposite problem; watching TV tires me out and makes me lethargic. I can't really get into TV watching unless it's a really solid show. Otherwise, I'm all about playing a solid game.

As a sibling has said, I get the opposite effect! Watching a movie or TV drains me, I feel like I need to highly focus to really take in the story and be present so I don’t have to constantly rewind 20-30 seconds here or there.

I’ve been playing Assassins Creed: Black Flag recently and find it incredibly relaxing, I hardly need to focus, I just cruise around, find anything I fancy from the minimap, battle other ships and explore cool locations.

I’d say the same mostly goes for NMS, but I get more invested in that as upgrades require specific components, which are available on certain planets etc, it takes a little more thought, but there’s no requirement to rush these upgrades, I might need some rare resource, I might jump 30 times exploring different planets as I go because it’s not something I _really_ need to get right now, it will arrive when it arrives and the journey and ‘choose your own pace’ type exploration mean the most to me.

Indeed! Think of all the old men on their death beds reminiscing with regret, 'I sure wish I spent less of my life doing the things I love.'

The obsession with productivity is weird. The entire point of earning money is to be able do the things you love. The biggest reasonable concern I can see in life is people spending immense amounts of times doing things they don't really enjoy, but somehow feel compelled towards nonetheless - like social media. I've put something like 2000 hours into Crusader Kings 2, and if I knew beforehand what I was getting into, I'd still do it again every single time. Just such an enjoyable and rewarding experience.

Well put

Most of us write crud apps and aren’t hackers, we just used to be.

900 hours might be begineer level in EU4

There are only three games approaching 1k hours or even exceeding it:

- Unreal Tournament (instagib)

- Stardew Valley

- Age of Empires 2

They all have one thing in common; they're extremely relaxing to play. Yes, even UT - I just turn my brain off and I stop thinking about life.

Factorio for me.

This. Best game to repeatedly burn out on.

For all its complexity, it's actually pretty much relaxing and autopilot once you've crossed a few hundred hours.

And the replayability is off the charts. The burnout is real, and then one day you really wanna pick it up again. Rinse and repeat.

Agree 100% I keep going back and starting again. Learning new things all the time. My #1 best game ever.

Brain off in AoE2?? (not MP right?)

No not MP.. haha.. that's funny.

1400 hours in TF2 here and I'm still a W+M1 Pyro. :)

Sorry haven’t played in a while what is a W+M1?

w = keyboard button to go forwards

m1 = Mouse button 1, "fire", in case of the pyro, the flamethrower

This is exactly it.

1000 years ago, in the original TF, I was a conc jumping medic, but pyro suits me better now that Medic conc grenades are gone. End of an era, imo.

Yeah I got about 30 hours, paid about $30 (there have been many sales where its much cheaper - plus IIRC its on Xbox Game Pass now).

Im more then happy at the cost/reward. Would seriously follow a new game by the same developer [1] the engoodening of No Man's Sky is a entertaining mini-doc on the game.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ

Go read some Steam reviews from time to time, just for fun. Hundreds of hours are a remarkably average playtime for many games. There are some with thousands of hours and still get a thumb down, heh.

Not Recommended

1763.4 hours on record

I hate Destiny 2, it’s my favorite game.

Yeah I must be at 300 hours in oxygen not included and I’ve never made of past mid game.

I’m not a gamer; I’ve almost never played PC games; I’m really only a Switch gamer and that’s it.

I can hear the cry of a thousand gamers if I tell them that I’ve crossed ~85 hours, longer than any other game so far, playing Super Mario 3D All Stars. The package the internet loves to hate. Oh well. :)

I am one example, I suppose, of how diverse gaming is.

To be fair that's a compilation.

True; but one of the entries is Sunshine.

I’d love to talk to one of the developers of that game. It’s so… strange; undercooked; odd.

Mario's a good game! I probably have tens of thousands of hours logged in my PC games, but there's still no denying Nintendo does a hell of a job crafting great gameplay into their titles.

I bought a guitar in 2001 for $500 and I estimate that I've put in close to 150,000 hours on it.

A musical instrument is a tool for self expression - not exactly equivalent is it?

Not exactly equivalent, but for some of us playing an instrument is every bit as entertaining as playing a video game.

games like Minecraft are very much a medium of self expression. Not to say every game is, but it's a definite genre

Yes you're right; I didn't make my point clearly. I've personally sunk a lot of time into base building in Rust.

It can be, but not exclusively. Sometimes it's a toy, sometimes it's therapy. What's the difference between playing a level over 100 times until you beat the boss vs playing a rift 100 times until you get it right?

Right... but what I mean is - a video game a piece of entertainment, whereas a guitar is tool for making pieces of entertainment, so it would surely not be surprising that the latter could provide quantitatively more enjoyment, as it offers more opportunities than a single game? To make the comparison a bit more obvious, what's the difference between playing a level for X hours to beat the boss, vs spending X hours learning how to create video games? It seems fairly obvious to me that if you enjoy the process and/or the result, the latter will deliver more longevity.

Considering I've spent most of my 80 hours in Armored Core 6 just designing ACs (building, equipping, painting, creating new decals and applying decals, testing, taking pictures, naming, writing lore)... yes I think it is. The only games I really get into are ones that let me express creativity.

Yes I agree; I didn't make my point very clearly. For sure there are games that allow for creative expression - I myself have spent many hours building houses in Rust for example - but not all games offer that nor set out to do so, so guitar vs game is not necessarily a useful comparison. To put it another way, you can pick up Godot for free, but I would expect a whole lot more opportunities for enjoyment using that tool than any single game could deliver, since you could in theory use it to build whatever you want. A guitar is a gateway to all of music, whereas No Man's Sky is a gateway only to itself.

Not to be too pedantic, but I think you have one too many zeros on that, unless you're playing 18 hrs a day, every day.

Maybe he plays twice as fast.

Time flies when you're rockin' out

They need to practice more. Ling-Ling is playing 40 hours a day.

I would rather compare a guitar to a console than a game.

Then again, I wouldn't compare playtime of Stairway to Heaven to an entire video game. Maybe Metallica's black album?

Almost certainly you have not. 40 hour weeks a year is ~2000 hours.

You should talk to Path of Exile players...

The tutorial is like seven hundred hours long, after which you might be able to beat the first boss.

Hillock is rough.

100 hours to design your character before entering the game. Skill forests.

Their comment wasn't "bad game" it was "not a game you keep coming back to".

More of a "disagree on the premise of the article" than "game didn't have enough content".

85 hours in the context of a game which is supposed to exist on a cosmic scale is not much.

Travelling at some fraction of light speed to cover the vast distances, 85 hours elapsed might equate to tens of thousands of hours in some relativistically static frame of reference.

I have over 3000 hours in DotA 2 :>.

I agree. Whenever I think about or see stats on time spent playing videos games I feel a little sick.

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