Time Sink

Another unexpected 40 hours lost into the time black hole known as Europa Universalis IV, my Game of the Year 2013, has me thinking about the games I’ve spent the longest with in my 30-year gaming career. Well, it has me thinking about that and also how to get the French to end their alliance with the Ottomans so I can attack one of them without the other sending 100,000 troops right up my … but, that’s not the topic here.

This new bout of EUIV gaming, a workweek of time that just seemed to vanish, now brings my total hours spent playing Paradox Interactive’s masterpiece up to nearly 250 total hours — almost ten and a half full days — which means I’ve spent almost 3% of the entire year of 2013 playing Europa Universalis IV.

Wait a minute, that can’t be right, can it? And if you take into account that the game has only been out since mid-August, which is about 150 days ago, 3600 hours, then let’s see — what percent of 3600 is 250?

Oh my God! I’m wasting my entire life with this game.

Which, again, is not a thought I’ve never had before. Catastrophic irresponsibility and family neglect aside (both of which, apparently, I’m getting pretty good at), I don’t think there are many self-identified gamers out there who haven’t had games crop up from time to time that simply take over your life. Here, then, are a few of mine.

World of Warcraft – Ah, where else could I possibly start but with the game that I played for something like 6 years. It’s impossible to know just how much time I put into that game, except to say that it’s a lot in the way that ordinary humans think about time, and also that it’s not all that much when compared to those who became truly obsessed by the game. If I had to guess, it’d be in the 400 hour range, which is probably the amount of time a lot of people sunk into just one character. I mean, at least I spread that time out across dozens of different characters.

My favorite part of WoW was always the part that most people just powered through to get to the “real game”. I loved the progression, the advancement from level 1 through to whatever the cap of the most recent expansion might be. I’ve probably spent as much time in Stranglethorn Vale or The Barrens as a lot of other players end up spending in raiding, simply by virtue of the fact that I have levelled through the early twenties and thirties countless times.

The game now in its old age, has become, as many successful MMOs do, both bloated and directionless. It doesn’t make sense anymore, as the progression of your character drives you through content and areas long-since resolved canonically. With multiple expansions under its belt, you can sense reset after reset happening, and the game has essentially exhausted its well of characters. But at its height, at its zenith, as The Burning Crusade became Wrath of the Lich King, WoW was as strong an MMO — and in many was as strong a video game — as any that had come before.

Such MMO. Very levels. wow.

Subspace/Continuum – This game was my first real online addiction. I learned about the game from working the computer department at a local Sears when I was in college. Those facts should give you a solid idea of how far in the past we’re talking about here. 1) I was going to college. 2) There was a computer department at a Sears. So: not recently.

A co-worker had managed to set up one of the machines to play this online game that he’d discovered, and while customers wandered through the store busily not buying computers — because, ya know, they were at Sears — he would play this game. It was a top-down, arcade-ish kind of game where you used a keyboard to pilot a spacecraft on a two-dimensional plane, collecting power-ups and fighting dozens of other players in these weird, bounded, maze-like, space-zones.

While my co-worker was shortly thereafter fired from Sears, I had found my new must-play game.

The allure of SubSpace, published by Virgin Interactive, is hard to quantify and explain. It was this wonderfully versatile game where all kinds of different playstyles and rulesets existed depending on whose server you played on. On one server you might find yourself on a giant, complicated map in a free-for-all against hundreds, cornering off some sliver of the arena and claiming it as your own, loudly daring any to come and challenge your dominion. Or you might find yourself on the next server playing an almost soccer-like game with teams, or a space version of capture the flag.

This was another game I played over years. Arguably I spent as much time playing this game as I did getting a college degree, at least in terms of how long the game stayed in the rotation. To this day I can’t really fully explain the obsession, except that it was one of my first major experiences with a strong online game and community. That first time can be a powerful experience.

Deus Ex – At this point I have played and completed the original Deus Ex at least a half dozen times. As a purely single-player game, I have without doubt played this longer than any other, though unlike other entries on this list, Deus Ex isn’t one where I become obsessed for a continuous stretch. Rather, this is the game I can return to after a long absence any time and still feel satisfied.

It’s not even that I would argue that Deus Ex were the greatest single-player game made, in the event that I were to hand out such an accolade. But from the perspective of narrative matched to gameplay, it just trips all the right triggers for me. An action, stealth, first-person-shooter RPG, there are few games truly like the original.

The narrative is of course schlocky nonsense, and the characters are paper thin. But despite its flaws, the game is infinitely memorable to me. I don’t just remember the ruined Statue of Liberty, or Hong Kong, or UNATCO HQ, or the VersaLife office, or Area 51, I remember how those levels felt, the impression they put on my experience. Each was unique, distinguishable from one another, and full of personality. The encounters were tense, and yet you felt your character gaining strength as his cyber implants upgraded.

Just talking about it makes me think I need to carve out another twenty hours for yet another playthrough.

Counter-Strike – This list would be woefully incomplete without a grudging nod to Counter-Strike.

Of all the games on this list, this is the one I hope never sees new life on my hard drive. I’m not sure why I have this lingering hostility to a game I dropped hundreds of hours into, except that by the time I finally put it away for good, I had long-since stopped enjoying the experience.

One AWP too many. One round of de_dust too many. One bouncy grenade too many. One bomb-that-blows-just-a-moment-before-I-have-it-defused too many. One unloading of a clip into an enemy — only to be headshot by one countering attack too many. One wall-hacker too many. I couldn’t say which of these things finally broke the camel’s back, but once I was able to quit, I never really looked back.

Though when I think back on my favorite gaming memories of all time, I have to admit that one of them is being the last player on your team and succeeding in getting the round victory. Knowing that by the end, everyone on the server is watching the high-noon stand-off is a special kind of video-game power Trip. Taking that moment and owning it is one of the few sensations in gaming that has truly made me feel, if only briefly, like a bad ass.

Civilization V – To be fair, I could really pick any Civilization and put it on this list (except maybe III), and in fact it’s such a given that Civ belongs on this kind of list that I almost forgot to put it on. The idea of Civilization being the quintessential one-more-turn game is so prevalent that it’s a cliche. Still, a quick look at my Steam profile reveals more than 200 hours given up to the latest incarnation of the classic series, which is probably par for the course with my level of commitment to a Civilization game.

After all these years, the fundamental conceit of the game holds up every bit as well as it did when Sid Meier released the original through MicroProse. Take a single city and from it, over the course of millennia, "build an empire to stand the test of time." Whether that means squashing your enemies under the boot of domination, building a spaceship to carry us to new worlds, or getting others to recognize you as a leader of all humankind and setting the stage for utopia and world peace, the game offers up an addicting brew of tech-trees, turn-based combat, city-building and exploration. There is no turn in a game of hundreds of such turns where there isn’t something interesting to do or plan for.

Halfway through any given game, I already know what I want to do differently in my next game. The system doesn’t just beg you to stick around until you get that next tech or you finally break through the walls of an enemy city. It begs you to come back for an entirely new run with a new civ, a new strategy, a new ruler and a new experience.

It defines addicting.

All told, I may not have hit 10,000 hours in any one game, but I may have sunk close to that number when you bring together my primary targets. I really have no regrets on it either, because each of these games ultimately gave me an unreasonable amount of fun. Yes. even Counter-Strike. Sometimes.

What are a few of your games that you’ve completely lost yourself, and perhaps weeks, to?

Comments

Minecraft and Civ are two of my biggest problems. Honorable mention goes to Borderlands/Borderlands 2. And if you add up all the versions of Halo over the years the total is uncomfortable to look at.

You guys pointed me at Minecraft, and Fire is to blame for Civ V and Borderlands.

Elysium wrote:

so I can attack one of them without the other sending 100,000 troops right up my … but,

I see what you did there!

It makes me happy that someone noticed.

Great article, Sean!

All Paradox games are like this for me. I "only" have 142 hours in EU4 but I feel I have just scratched the surface on it. CK2, since I didn't buy it on Steam, I have no idea about. but 250-300 hours sounds right. EU3 was probably in the 500 hour range (another non-Steam purchase. 218 hours in Vicky 2.

I did not get into Civ 5 (only 109 hours in it - actually, I kind of don't like that Steam tracks the hours you have played) but every Civ before that was my massive time sink. What is it about grand strategy games that allow us to lose ourselves in them? The deep systems and emregent gameplay, I guess? The make your own story aspects? All of the above?

The king for me though is TF2. Steam says I have 1702 hours in it (with about 6 hours of idling in there). That's almost 71 days! Crazy to think about, so I usually don't. For me, TF2, at this point, is brainless fun. When I come home from work and don't want to think anymore, TF2 fits the bill perfectly. It also helps that the GWJ TF2 community is still kicking and still awesome.

World of Warcraft wins by a considerable margin for me. I look back on life in the first decade of the new millenium and I think of it not in terms of jobs, houses, kids, but rather in WoW exapansions, "mains," and "progression/farming raiding content." What this game has been able to achieve in this respect is simply incredible. It was - and I argue continues to be in many respects - the epitome of "something for everyone."

Honorable mentions:

The Binding of Issac - I think I'm up to 150 hours on this game just in a stretch of a few months. Bolstered by equal parts BoILER (Binding of Issac racing league), my aging reflexes which cause me to die a bunch, and the sheer enjoyment of the RNG/superfluous items/roguelike nature of the game, I've found it supremely addictive.

Unreal Tournament - Since it's birth in the late 90s, no other shooter has come close to mattering so much to me as UT. The weaponry, the skins, the creative levels, the music, the crisp multiplayer, the mods, the attitude. It remains my favorite shooter of all time and is still something (UT 2004 these days) that I can install, play, and enjoy for hours upon hours.

Stunt Driver - here's a blast from the past, but in terms of sandbox games, this one takes the cake for the amount of time I sunk into attempting to build things (sorry, Minecraft just doesn't do it for me). The goal was the gnarliest tracks with the wickedest jumps that borderlined on impossible to finish but still doable.

Doom/Doom II - iddqd. idkfa. idnoclip. Nuff said.

EDIT: I left out Pinball Arcade. Much sadness. The greatest iOS and/or pinball game of all time!

I think Everquest still holds the crown. It broke something in me, something vital.

IMAGE(http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/3206/qj6p.jpg)

Yep.

  • Civilization II
  • Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
  • Sid Meier's Pirates!

Curse you, Sid Meier.

  • Asheron's Call
  • Spelunky
  • Morrowind, Oblivion, & Skyrim
  • Guild Wars 2
  • Multiplayer in Warcraft 2, Total Annihilation, & Age of Empires II
  • Half-Life multiplayer & Counter-Strike
  • Halo(s)
  • Mario Kart(s)
  • Super Smash Bros.(s)
  • Animal Crossing: City Folk, Harvest Moon: Animal Parade, & Rune Factory: Frontier
    • (The colons should have given them away)
  • Oh yes, and Minecraft, Terraria, and Starbound. Can't forget those.

Of recent games, Space Pirates and Zombies and Gnomoria.

Older games? Dungeon Siege 2.

I guess I just like games that play themselves. There is something very relaxing for me about being able to sit down and watch the ant colony at work.

Certis wrote:

I think Everquest still holds the crown. It broke something in me, something vital.

shhhhhhh..... I don't mention Evercrack.

Or Mechwarrior 2.

Or Wing Commander.

Or Alpha Centauri.

Or Master of Orion....

ScurvyDog wrote:

Stunt Driver - here's a blast from the past, but in terms of sandbox games, this one takes the cake for the amount of time I sunk into attempting to build things (sorry, Minecraft just doesn't do it for me). The goal was the gnarliest tracks with the wickedest jumps that borderlined on impossible to finish but still doable.

The awesomeness of this game combined with the fact that it was only one of a few games I had on my hard drive at the time meant I must have dropped hundreds of hours into it. IROC-Z FTW.

I'll give a nod to Counter-Strike and CS:Source as well. I was a member of a clan, I did play competitively, and there's no measure of how many hours I put into it. I even built and administered a community website for a brief period when Source came out. Fortunately, I was single and had oodles of time on my hands as to not feel guilty about my addiction.

Finally, for me, Command and Conquer: Renegade was a huge time suck for me. I don't know why I loved this game so much. It had great mechanics and sort of a real-time game economy that worked much like the RTS, except each player had a budget and could use it to build themselves vehicles or upgrade their character build to an elite unit. I put most of my time into this shortly after I graduated from college and was a bachelor living with several other guys killing time in a basement apartment.

Obsessions in chronological order:

Sid Meier's Pirates!
Bandit Kings of Ancient China (which I still play from time to time)
Quake (nearly 5 years!)
Age of Empires I & II
Unreal Tournament and UT2004 (still played it until somewhat recently)
Europa Universalis I & II
Rise of Nations (also played it until just a few years ago)
Galactic Civilizations II

Honorable Mention:
Basically all of the early KOEI strategy games, starting with Genghis Khan, moving onto Romance of the 3 Kingdoms (I get almost every new iteration), and finally culminating with the already mentioned Bandit Kings of Ancient China.

Wolfenstein 3D - Yes, the old one. I have no idea how many hours we were trying to get to the end of that game. And it was that game that I learnt "Mazes are made from the left side", which I have no idea if it is actually true, but whatever.

Doom II - When you play that game on two computers connected through LPT port...is that what is called "multiplayer" now? It's two players...that is multi, right? Damn, that is long time ago. The same goes basically to Descent and Terminal Velocity.

Golden Axe - Played that many times with my best friend "split screen"...without that "split" part.

Wayne Gretzky Hockey II Oh, gosh, countles hours of coop plays against CPU of this thing. It worked as a perfect antivirus software too. That damn thing wouldn't start if you got infected.

I have to stop writting this, already feeling too old for my age.

BTW, should I still START playing WOW? Isn't it kind of...late?

Solitaire.

Minesweeper.

Oops, double post.

Steam says I have 192 hours in Dragon Age Origins... Then another 107 in the DAO Ultimate Edition. Scary that I had no idea it was that long.

Besides that, the usual suspects: WOW, Civ series and similar 4x games like MOO2 and Alpha Centauri.

It’s impossible to know just how much time I put into that game,

Not true, at least if you're still subscribed.

Log in, and type /played. This is per-character, not per-account, so you may have to do it several times.

Okay, so offhand, in approximate order:

Trinity. I lost a good chunk of a summer to this Infocom game, and I was so deeply immersed that when I gained the ability to move the in-game sun in the sky, I reacted almost exactly as though I'd done it with the real thing. It's one of my strongest gaming memories.

Civilization. I got this a little before one Christmas vacation, and eating, sleeping, and bathing become optional for a couple of weeks.

Counter-Strike. As one of the first people with DSL (one of the original Low Ping Bastards), a very hot computer, and good reflexes, I was very, very good at this game. There was some website with global stats, and by their measurements, for awhile I was about #350 out of, oh, probably about 100, maybe 150K players at the time. (it got much bigger, later.) I have no way to measure, but I bet I put a couple thousand hours into this game. I was already starting to age, though, and each time they updated the weapon spread and damage models, my subconscious had to relearn it, and it was slower each time. Sometime in the vicinity of 1.0, they broke me completely again, turning me into a noob yet again, and I just couldn't stomach learning the game ANOTHER time. I'd put in my time, I'd gotten to a really high level of skill, and they wasted it all for about the fourth time, and I just quit playing in disgust.

It's not like they missed me.

Somewhere in the middle of my profound Counterstrike addiction, I was janking around a little with emulators, and I found a SNES title called Chrono Trigger. SNES9X, at the time, couldn't properly handle the transparencies in some haunted forest or other, and I was so hooked by that point in the game that I immediately went to EBay and bought a real SNES and a real Chrono Trigger cart. (The cart cost twice what the SNES did... about $100.) When it showed, my Counterstrike buddies hardly saw me for a good couple weeks. A four- or five-year old game, on wildly inferior hardware, completely shattered (or at least suspended) the strongest game lock I've ever experienced. It was that good. (and it was BLOODY ENORMOUS. I still am awed and humbled by the mountain of content they were able to pack into just four megabytes.)

World of Warcraft had me massively hooked, all through the Burning Crusade. I loved to explore and see new things, and having all that content locked away behind skill gates was powerfully motivating for me. (There are still several of those dungeons I've never seen.) I showed up and did my grinding faithfully... most of the guild was doing that, at the time. For whatever reason, the tedium/reward level was almost exactly perfect to keep me interested, and I just played and played and played. Made some really good friends that I miss very much.

Team Fortress 2 sort of replaced it, and per Steam, I'm at 936 hours. Loved that game, but it went south fast once they started to monetize it. Free to play is a goddamn curse, and I wish the person that thought of the concept nothing but ill. That old routine where Bill Hicks invites all marketers to die? I am fully in support. Fully.

Minecraft had a pretty good lock on me for awhile. I really like how Notch &co treated me, and I'd buy it again in a heartbeat if I needed to.

Dawn of War 1, with the Dawn of Skirmish AI, has gotten an amazing amount of my play time over the years. It's about ten years old, and I ran a skirmish or two, most nights, for that entire time. I didn't play it much in 2013, possibly the first year since it shipped where I didn't. There's just too much else going on, and the deluge seems to increase every year.

Civilization (I and IV)
Elite

I actually had to uninstal civ.
Roller coaster tycoon 2 was a big one. I want to play it again but I don't want to suddenly realize I haven't slept and am late for work.

I don't know about some of the older games, but Steam has some of the metrics on my newer ones.

Borderlands 2 - 852 hours. Multiple max-level characters, no speed-leveling, a fair bit of farming on each one at various levels.

Civilization V - 1495 hours - all the standard base game Civs up to King, at least two of the Vic conditions for most of the Civs.

Mass Effect series - no metrics except for characters. 5 characters in ME1, all mission-completed. 4 of those carried over and completed in ME2. 2 characters finished in ME3.

Kingdoms of Amalur - actually finished the game and most of the sidequests in its enormous list. Lost my metrics when Origin updated.

CounterStrike/Starcraft - played both competitively for a while. Even practice games with the A-teams gets exciting when a spectating crowd forms.

Given that just Borderlands 2 and Civ V exceeds 2000 hours, and I know I've played many games more than those two, I am absolutely confident that I have exceeded 10000 hours playing games.

My big time sinks were multiplayer games -- I spent an awful lot of time on a Neverwinter Nights multiplayer server. And the folks there introduced me to World of Warcraft at about the time the Burning Crusade expansion came out.

Let's see now. High-school and college, I spent most time playing Tie Fighter then Master of Orion II. Lots of time I should have spent studying.

I flirted with Civ and CivII when they came out, but I didn't get into serious time wasting until Alpha Centauri. My roommate at the time called it the "tap-tap game" cause I was playing it on a laptop with a trackpad and you had to tap it pretty hard to get it to register.

I then went into a long gaming hiatus until I discovered Mass Effect. Lot's of time there...mostly cause of the Mako. I also discovered this site and it's orgy of enabling during Steam Sales. Sins of a Solar Empire was next. Followed my more Mass Effect sequels and Dragon Age: Origins.

This year was Crusader Kings II, SW:TOR, and my most recent timesink, XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Enemy Within.

Elysium wrote:

My favorite part of WoW was always the part that most people just powered through to get to the “real game”. I loved the progression, the advancement from level 1 through to whatever the cap of the most recent expansion might be. I’ve probably spent as much time in Stranglethorn Vale or The Barrens as a lot of other players end up spending in raiding, simply by virtue of the fact that I have levelled through the early twenties and thirties countless times.

and

Malor wrote:

World of Warcraft had me massively hooked, all through the Burning Crusade. I loved to explore and see new things, and having all that content locked away behind skill gates was powerfully motivating for me. (There are still several of those dungeons I've never seen.) I showed up and did my grinding faithfully... most of the guild was doing that, at the time. For whatever reason, the tedium/reward level was almost exactly perfect to keep me interested, and I just played and played and played. Made some really good friends that I miss very much.

I have this terrible habit of leaving a game on pause and walking away for several hours or even a whole night. So, most of my Steam hours played are severely bloated. I've got like 900 hours in Skyrim. But World of Warcraft, for a time, was just a huge part of my life. Those hours played aren't bloated. Elysium and Malor describe very well the reasons that game had a hold on me.

Its not a suprise to see my top 3 be MMO's... Everquest, Everquest 2 and Wow. Other games that I have spent way to much time on are Minecraft and the Sims (any of em)

Yeah, after their big change to 'anyone gets to see everything eventually', because they nerf stuff until everyone can get there, it took away any motive I really had for grinding. Why work hard if I'll get to see it in a couple months without working hard?

And, then: if it's not hard to get to, why do I even care about being able to see it?

And that leads to: so why pay for this?

I guess I'm a lightweight. It's rare that put 100 hours into a single game, but then I don't like MMOs, so there's that.

The top of the list for me would probably Diablo 2. I'm sure I played at least 100 hours, if not 200, spread across the vanilla game and the expansion.

Next would be the Borderlands series. I have just over 200 hours combined between 1 and 2 and their expansions.

I have no way to know the number of hours, but over the course of the SimCity series (1 through 4), I would guess that I've put in a couple hundred hours combined.

The only other thing I can think of that's 100 hours is Saints Row. I have right at 100 combined hours played across 3 and 4 and their DLC.

I forgot city of villans. Tons of time but never felt like much of a time sink because of the social aspect of pugs

A bit shocked Skyrim hasn't been mentioned yet. I've got 1000 hours or so. But I would add that without nexus mods I would have stopped at 200 probably. Dragon age origins follows a similar trajectory, probably 4 complete playthroughs but Nexus helped me jazz up 2.5 of them. Steam workshop has enhanced my civ v games but doesn't have that same crucial life extension effect as nexus has had with RPGs.

For me it would have to be World of Warcraft, which I started playing in open beta, and played solidly for 4-5 years. I don't want to think about the hours...but seeing as I just did I'd guess at around 2000.

Beyond that it's around 250 hours each for Hearts of Iron 3 and Terraria. Terraria is bloated though because of leaving my multiplayer server up in the early days.

Going back earlier to a time when people didn't think about playing games in terms of hours - Might and Magic 6 and Baldur's Gate 2 with a couple of playthroughs each would be a couple of hundred hours.

I have a friend on Steam would only plays one game, which is Stalker Call of Pripyat. He is endlessly playing with mods, and is currently up around 3500 hours on it. He plays a hardcore version where he'll start a 30-40 hour playthrough again if he gets killed anytime through the game. I can't exactly throw stones but I do shake my head at it.

Duke Nukem 3D was my comfort game for a couple of years. I played the first campaign on Come Get Some countless times, always with perfect health as I knew the enemies' locations and AI routines by heart. I never really liked Doom or its clones, this was actually the first FPS I fell in love with.

Civilization I've got 179 hours in Civ V, but plenty more in Civ II I'm sure.

Championship / Football Manager My first CM was CM2, but I spent the most time in CM 97/98. If you're playing the Champions League final with a Belgian team, you know you've spent too much time in the game Other honorable mentions: Premier Manager 3, Ultimate Soccer Manager 2, and some Amiga soccer management game.

Pizza Tycoon The playground hype back in high school for a couple of months. Even non-gamers picked it up. Still the best tycoon game I've ever played.

Kerbal Space Program - near 500 hours...

I've been playing the same mud off and on since 1999. I would be shocked if my total time played was less than 5000 hours.