When You Want To Play A Game But Can’t Settle On One – What’s Really Going On?

When you’re a gamer at heart, and never quite walk away from enjoying a farming sim or an online FPS from time to time, the idea that gaming might one day become your arch nemesis sounds pretty silly.

However, if you’ve also had those moments where it felt like you couldn’t find a single thing to play (despite having a Steam backlog longer than the Amazon), we’ve got some bad news for you.

You’re already in the throes of a love-hate relationship with your fave hobby.

The key thing now is to understand why. What’s making it so hard to find a game you might enjoy? And if you’ve got so many games to play already, why can’t you stand even the thought of spending a few hours on any of them?

Well, we’ve got a couple theories about this phenomenon that we want to share with you.

You’re Looking for Variety Without Complexity

Let’s face it, how many times have you opened up a new game you’ve never played before (but owned for ages), only to spend maybe 5 to 10 minutes on the tutorial before turning it off? You didn’t even get to the end of the tutorial. You just quickly got bored, rolled your eyes, and quit to the main menu.

Well, it might have been because the game itself was genuinely just a bit boring. Too much text to read through, a few too many forced stops when you were just trying to play, etc. But it’s more likely that you’re just not in the right headspace to actually learn this game right now.

You don’t want to. You’re just not in the mood for it.

And when you’re bored like this, with an already limited mental capacity for taking on new information, you’re just going to get frustrated and shut it all down.

You want to do something fun. You don’t want to have to get into the in depth crafting and combat systems the game suddenly throws at you. You don’t want to try to work out the million different pieces of the puzzle as you wander through a walking simulator.

You just want the kind of fun you can immediately wrap your head around. And that is OK – really it is. After all, you’ve put thousands of hours into games that have wiki databases with more pages than Les Mis. You know you can get stuck in when you want to.

But that’s the thing. You don’t want to right now. And to prevent yourself from closing down your Steam library or simply shutting the console off and feeling bummed out about it, you need to work with the feeling as is.

So, what should you play instead?

If the old favorites aren’t hitting either, you need something with both a bit of variety and a simple gaming system you can instantly find your groove with.

It’s why a lot of people will turn to casino-type games here, including your standard solitaire or poker, as well as Pusulabet slots, online bingo, and sports betting pages. There’s a strong hit of dopamine that can come from both the uncertainty of the outcome and the ease of the play itself.

If those kinds of games aren’t your thing, many single-player indie entries have recreated this kind of quick gaming cycle. Recent titles like Cloverpit offer the exact kind of fun and lightly creative gameplay you’re most likely to find amenable right now.

And you can stay in the roguelite genre for all kinds of games that work in a similar way – even if you swear you’re not a roguelite person.

You Need to Do Something Else

If you usually love gaming, but you just can’t find one to fall in love with right now, you might just need to listen to what your brain is saying.

You can’t find a game that feels right. That’s one thing. You’ve tried a bunch of different games and not settled on any of them for more than half an hour at a time. That’s another thing.

But when put together, they’re parts of a sum that have one definite answer: you’re simply not loving gaming right now.

Sometimes you do have to reverse engineer the symptom (the feeling) to find the cause. And in this case, the cause is probably the fact that you’re feeling a bit burnt out.

Everything runs its course, even the things we usually love to do. And when it comes to a hobby like gaming, there’s so much to do within the realms of the hobby itself that you feel like you could never get bored of it. But the truth is, you absolutely can.

And when that boredom crops up, there’s no real need to try and ‘push through it’. Not only is it entirely unnecessary, seeing as this is a hobby and you’re supposed to be enjoying yourself. But also because the more you push, the longer the break will be on the other side.

So take that break now.

You need it! You need to put the gamepad down or turn the RGB lights on that keyboard off (not really, but you need a keyboard for everything you do on a computer, so you can’t just put it down).

And instead of spending your time gaming, you need to explore other hobbies that’ll let your brain find its energy again. This really could be anything, so don’t limit yourself here. If something looks or sounds interesting to try, give it a try and see how you like it.

When Gaming Becomes So Very Unsatisfying

You never thought it would happen, but you just can’t find anything you want to play. And you’d know, because you’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to.

Refocus a little here. Figure out where the feeling is coming from.

Easier said than done, of course, but the more you think about your current gaming dissatisfaction, the more layers you’ll uncover.