What Motivates You to Game?

[CreepyOldDude]

Hmmm. Good question.

I guess my list would look like this:

Excitement: I want to be excited by the game I'm playing. I should really focus in on it, it should affect my heart rate, and my BP.

Discovery: I like it. Whether it's exploring the map, or discovering the secret of the temple, or what. I just like it.

Challenge: My number three. I love a game that challenges me, requiring that I learn a new skill. This will probably be moving down the list, in years to come, as my twitch speed drops. Old age is a Bichon Frise.

Destruction: I like the realism of a destructible environment, in both single-player, and multi-player games. If I'm hiding behind a car, and someone fires an RPG into it, then I'm either now hiding behind some other piece of cover, or I'm toast.

Completion: Some games I love have a story arc, like Dying Light, or the Fallout games, or the Far Cry games. Others, like the Battlefield games, don't. I like games with a story arc, but sometimes you don't want to have to bother with an arc.

Story: Goes along with Completion. A good story can really make a game. But it's sometimes not needed. Like with the Lemmings games.

Competition: Like you, Polly, I grew up on mostly single player games. But, I do love the Battlefield series. So, not at the bottom, but down a few from the top.

Strategy: I enjoy RTS games, especially the StarCraft games, but FPS is my first love.

Fantasy: I like a good fantasy game, even though I mostly prefer FPS games, which usually aren't fantasy.

Community: I'm too much of a misanthrope to like community, really.

Designing: Not a SimCity fan, or other similar games. Just not my style. Although I do like the Rail Road Tycoon game.

Power: Being OP is boring.

[Peter1469]

I like strategy games, I'm hooked on the Total War series. Destroying the Roman Empire is such an enjoyable thing to do.

Total War is a good one.

[Captain Obvious]

I don't "game" much, real life is plenty of action for me, I suggest that if you feel the need to use gaming as an outlet to reality maybe consider reevaluating your life priorities. There's a lot of stuff out there besides TV screens and gaming consoles.

I have played games and still do occasionally. Civilization III is one I play intermittently, have been doing that for a long time too. Final Fantasy VII is another one. Once a year or so I run a campaign and I haven't played for maybe a year or so, I'm due.

The Tomb Raider series is another one that me and her played together, when we were in the camper since we didn't have TV and it was something to do in the evenings.

What attracts me is strategy, mostly. Action, visuals, stuff like that is really secondary.

A long time ago, decade or more maybe I was playing Uru and Myst and a couple of the spin-offs. I played Uru again a couple years ago with her but she didn't care much for it, it's really, really tricky and you have to cheat a little with a strategy guide to get through it. And the Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights series, I was really into Neverwinter Nights because the game provided you with a builders program, you could basically build your own campaign which I had fun doing. I hacked the game code to see how the pros did it and learned from that.

[Hal Jordan]

I had to think about this for a bit. It can really vary what I want most out of a game. I want different things out of different games. In some games I want to destroy, while in others I want a challenge. After some careful thought, I believe I was able to get a general order going.

1. Fantasy
2. Story
3. Discovery

10. Completion (I enjoy a lot of games that have no real end. I did only choose this one because I went solely by the list. Otherwise, it would be graphics. If the game is enjoyable, it's not as important if it is state of the art graphics, 8-bit, or what.)
11. Community (while I may enjoy playing games with friends, I don't ever go into games trying to meet others, though I have met those in games that I would consider friends.)
12. Designing

[Hal Jordan]

I don't "game" much, real life is plenty of action for me, I suggest that if you feel the need to use gaming as an outlet to reality maybe consider reevaluating your life priorities. There's a lot of stuff out there besides TV screens and gaming consoles.

I have played games and still do occasionally. Civilization III is one I play intermittently, have been doing that for a long time too. Final Fantasy VII is another one. Once a year or so I run a campaign and I haven't played for maybe a year or so, I'm due.

The Tomb Raider series is another one that me and her played together, when we were in the camper since we didn't have TV and it was something to do in the evenings.

What attracts me is strategy, mostly. Action, visuals, stuff like that is really secondary.

A long time ago, decade or more maybe I was playing Uru and Myst and a couple of the spin-offs. I played Uru again a couple years ago with her but she didn't care much for it, it's really, really tricky and you have to cheat a little with a strategy guide to get through it. And the Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights series, I was really into Neverwinter Nights because the game provided you with a builders program, you could basically build your own campaign which I had fun doing. I hacked the game code to see how the pros did it and learned from that.

The Civilization games are ones I can (and do) always return to. I'll come back to the Final Fantasy series as well (though I haven't played the newer ones). I've played since the first game of both. I do prefer the older Dragon Warrior to the older Final Fantasy, though.

Personally, I could never get into the Tomb Raider series.

I haven't played Uru. I still need to finish Myst. Lost access to it a long time ago, but I was fascinated with it when it came out. I didn't get too far into Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights. I gave those to my dad not too long after I got them because he was looking for new games. But hey, at the time I got them for $10.

[IMPress Polly]

Yeah I don't need fancy graphics myself either. What I like best in the visual department is for the developer to express themselves through the graphics, not just always try and make them as realistic as possible. Besides, smaller developers don't have the resources to make realistic graphics anyway and that hardly makes their games worse. I'm in the minority in that view though, as two-thirds say that "quality of the graphics" are a factor for them in deciding whether or not to buy a game, which makes them overall the #1 most common factor people consider. (See page 14 at the link.)

[Common]

Competition, comaraderie, I used to play FPS games started a long time ago with the first Quake and played it all the way to the end. I started playing WOW in 2006

I like the guild group in quake and the clan groups in wow.

[Common]

Competition, comaraderie, I used to play FPS games started a long time ago with the first Quake and played it all the way to the end. I started playing WOW in 2006

I like the guild group in quake and the clan groups in wow.

Actually I got it reversed, clans in quake...guilds in wow

[Meh]

Total War is a good one.

Im addict find myself playing the first rtw more than anything mainly because I can run it on my laptop. It's amazing how the game doesn't seem stale after all these years.

[Peter1469]

Im addict find myself playing the first rtw more than anything mainly because I can run it on my laptop. It's amazing how the game doesn't seem stale after all these years.

I agree. For a long time I used Rome Total Realism, but have don't been able to find a new download of that. It was amazing. But it didn't work with in of the official RTW addons.