About a month ago, I faced a gaming burnout. In the middle of playing a nice title, I realized that I stopped enjoying the game although it featured a huge open world, a gorgeous plot, a cast of well-written characters and interesting gameplay. But a dozen hours pass by and I find myself barely managing to complete the middle of the main storyline with the feeling of excitement evaporating before my very eyes. The pleasure from playing games was gone almost entirely, leaving behind only fatigue, boredom, apathy and disinterest. In the end, I left the title without beating the final boss. So where did it all start?
Usually, when I come home after work, I want to relax and get a quick fix of serotonin: have a tasty meal and spend some time playing video games on my PC or console. Opening the Steam library, the list of Sony games or Game Pass catalog can stump you for up to an hour, just choosing whatever game you are in the mood for. Add in a couple of friends that invite you to lose some time in League or some other MOBA/shooter, and you are seemingly all set for hours of entertainment.
However, half an hour in or so I realized that nothing from my lengthy list of games interests me – some things I have already played, others I am saving for later, some titles are simply too lengthy to start without a clear commitment. Once a favorite pastime became boring and mechanical. A huge number of available games killed the interest in them, turning gaming into a chore and causing emotional burnout which, in turn, led to more serious consequences.
Before tackling on how to fight the gaming burnout, let’s try and see some of the reasons that could have potentially caused it:
- External reasons such as family troubles, work problems, certain events happening in your city, country or the world as a whole;
- The games and the gaming process themselves have become routine;
- Too many choices
There are many other possible reasons, big and small alike, but I feel like these three are the most important.
The first reason must be dealt with as much as your abilities will allow. If there are ways to tackle problems in the family or at work such as going to therapy, discussing the problem or even swapping jobs, you can only have a small impact on the global events happening around you. Therefore, spend your strength and time on things you can change and try to stop worrying about spheres where you can not do anything. Political, economical and other world-class problems cannot be solved in a couple of conversations as they require the efforts of an entire society. If you are politically active, invest your strength into smaller tasks and do not bear the responsibility for the entire world on your shoulders, or it will crush you.
Other possible changes might include starting a family, getting more personal responsibility, adverse conditions in relationships, getting tired of bad habits or being stuck outside of the comfort zone for a prolonged period of time. You might stop getting pleasure from games but begin to enjoy some other activity or face depression and notice that nothing seems to bring you joy anymore.
Games can be considered as a source of endorphins which, unlike books or movies, requires active participation of a person, a certain amount of work. Actually, this requirement exacerbates the whole situation: when your responsibilities feel oppressive and ever-present, there is no desire to do any kind of work for a questionable emotional response, even for something seemingly as easy as a game of Call of Duty.
Another thing is that many gamers are treating playing as work. Why is it so? The fault is our overall approach to gaming as well as artificial timegating employed by many titles. Every day, at a certain time and for a certain period, we sit down to play our favorite games. Every day we borrow a little serotonin but such debts also need to be repaid. And when that time comes, our brain begins to perceive gaming sessions as routine or as a second job. All those feelings that used to bring joy and satisfaction disappear, leaving players bored and wanting to relax even more. Even worse if you continuously play the same game or multiple games that feature similar patterns.
Just think about Genshin Impact or Honkai: Star Rail. You log in, use up your Resin/Trailblaze Energy to farm some resources, bosses or gear, do your dailies and that’s… about it. Once a couple weeks you tackle the reset of the Spiral Abyss / Memory of Chaos and do weekly tasks for Battle Pass. That’s it. Repeat it again, the next day. And the next. And the next…
“Vaas : Did I ever tell you what the definition of insanity is? Insanity is doing the exact… same thing… over and over again expecting… shit to change…”
As a result, we can spend dozens or even hundreds of hours in one or two games without receiving any significant psychological or emotional feedback. The brain understands that we are just wasting time, and all our attempts to deceive ourselves otherwise fail. Which, in turn, pushes us away from the desire to play as the awareness of wasted time is getting stronger until it blocks our ability to enjoy games altogether. If the problem has a systematic pattern, say DOTA or LOL or any other MOBA of your choice with thousands of hours played, it might start feeling like a second job.
Often enough, we simply cannot choose from a huge number of options for gaming entertainment. And, instead of playing some kind of new title or picking up something from your backlog, we go to Youtube, Tik Tok, social networks and so on. It might seem that the problem is far-fetched, but it really is not. Even the American psychologist Barry Schwartz in his work “The Choice Paradox” described that a person falls into a kind of paralysis when forced to make a choice from hundreds of options for something.
Due to the increase in scale, the feeling of importance and responsibility for this choice increases proportionally. We regard it as something that we have to take very seriously and, as with any difficult task, we put it off until later. And that “later” might never come. Even if by some miracle we manage to make a choice, we are under pressure from the second problem described by Schwartz: a sense of lost profit or the FOMO effect. The bottom line is that while playing one game, we are simultaneously thinking that maybe we missed out on more fun that another game from the list could have offered.
And so we find ourselves sitting down and playing without getting any pleasure from the process while our brains think about a dozen other games and how much better it would have been playing them instead. Post-Covid times are known not only for the virus itself, but also for the struggle of different streaming services for people’s time. How does one choose between a dozen games, half a hundred movies or shows? What is better, spending time playing RDR2 or watching The Boys, Stranger Things or Dexter? Or maybe doing something unusual and instead sitting down to watch Kubrick’s The Shining or Atomic Blonde? All of those sound pretty good.
The number of all possible games and other entertainment options exceeded the Strategy of Moderate Choice, a concept introduced by Herbert Simon in the 1950s. Barry Schwartz studied the issue, examining the behavior of the “maximizers” (those who strive to have all the best) and the “moderates” (those who are satisfied with “good enough”). In a situation with a huge number of options, the search for the best leads a person to a paralyzed state since the only way to determine the best option is to explore every alternative available.
Over the course of the study, Barry Schwartz found out that people that sought to choose the very best in life were often more depressed; making a decision took them much longer and they were less satisfied with the choice they made compared to the people who settled on a “good enough” option. Having read this far, have you recognized yourself in the paragraphs above?
Another little problem is the change of taste.
A certain genre that was fun and interesting for you to play before might stop being so as you were fed up with it and stopped enjoying the process. Perhaps you got tired of similar mechanics, the general direction of the genre that might have become too simplistic overtime or maybe there are just no new worthwhile entries. A change of taste might lead to a point where you no longer get into that flow that previously gave you satisfaction, instead offering only boredom from dull monotonous actions that you’ve done a thousand times before.
So, how to cope with the state when you want to have fun and play but don’t actually want to spend time in any games? We have come up with an approximate list of problems, so now we have to figure out how to deal with them all.
Let’s start from the end, the change of taste. You need to move away from the usual conditions in which you find yourself gaming and try something new. For example, try your hand in a new genre. If you usually play RPGs, try strategies, Survivals or some other genre, this change might give you the drive you seek.
If games have ceased to satisfy you at all, then you should look at other activities to spend your time on. Gaming burnout is just a type of emotional burnout, and you need to take it seriously. Try to find yourself in something new: start going to a gym or try out embroidering or knitting. Perhaps the very state of involvement and maximum concentration, the so-called flow, lies somewhere else.
Personally, I started to collect puzzles, both 3D/moving ones as well as regular ones and draw pictures by numbers – some of them related to my favorite gaming titles. I gathered a small collection of comics related to my favorite universe and even some manga, re-read the entire Dune series and a couple of others.
You can also attempt the Detox technique: completely remove video games from your life for weeks or even months. It’s like you clear your brain of everything familiar, connected with computers, consoles or games, and then return to it with renewed vigor. In other words, whet your appetite. Of course, it is not a guarantee that it will definitely work, but if you are not getting any pleasure out of gaming as is, why not attempt it anyway? What are you really losing?
Life events and problems also need to be dealt with. Some things you can tackle, while others you are helpless in and have to work to accept. Your life may develop in such a way that you will not have time for games but you shouldn’t consider it as a pure negative. You can try gamifying your real life instead and bringing your gaming skills into it. Of course, don’t take this too literally. Your ability to score frags in CS:GO is hardly necessary in an office environment, however, considering climbing the career ladder as a way of leveling up is not a bad option.
If you have a problem with the sheer amount of choices, you can treat it with self-restraint and a certain level of asceticism. It will help you choose more meticulously since you will be able to understand more clearly what it is that you want and need. After all, when your Steam library is pushing a thousand titles, it is very difficult to choose something because you want it all at once.
What helped me was to change activities for a month, swap gaming for reading and drawing a lot instead. However, even if you burn out completely and abandon gaming as a hobby altogether, you may have an opportunity to try yourself in something new. You don’t have to go back to games, there are many hobbies and entertainments in life. You may find that family serves better as your outlet and spending time with your children or significant other, sharing hobbies and activities with them brings you more dopamine than gaming ever did.
