When did you stop playing games for fun.

I stop playing games when they stop being fun, does that count?

Even by your definition of fun, I'm blessed in that I've never really gone down that path too much. I'll push through frustrating 'stuck' parts, because it's hard for game designers to be perfect, so a few pain points are expected.

But things that are explicitly designed in ways that are not fun, or even when I can tell that the optimal method for something isn't fun for me, don't get a lot of my time.

I don't care about losing, I care about the times when 'playing the way I want to' isn't a thing the game really 'allows', which means that for competitive games, I can equally easily 'enjoy losing 0-50' because I'm having fun, or 'hate winning 20-0' because my opponent refuses to let the contest be enjoyable.

So I think that for me specifically, IF this ever changed, it was for some relatively short period when I was very young, and changed back at some point.

The games are fun BECAUSE I play them to win or to compete or to even just get all the achievements. Otherwise I wouldn't be playing them.

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Yeah I think so. Can you clarify more of your definition of it, though? My group members would probably be glad to throw in their data too.

The definition of fun I usually use when designing games is related to my fortune in life.

"Fun is expressing your self/style in order to face a challenge that can be overcome."

This applies whether the challenge is set by yourself (such as a game that is technically unbeatable, but you can challenge yourself to reach a high score/high skill level) or by the game.

In my perspective, if a game is just 'pattern matching trying to find the way the designer wanted you to do it', and you can't express your own style, it can be 'entertaining' and even 'engaging' but I don't call it 'fun'. Similarly, if the game gives absolute style freedom but no goals at all and you don't have any way to use your style to distinguish your outcomes from anyone else's (basically everyone arrives at the same outcome) it's a leisure activity like... knitting, or 'walking on a beach', but not 'fun'.

I'm pretty interested in your perspective on it. But if this is getting too deep or derailing, just ignore me.