What do you expect to get out of a video game session?

A simple question with a complicated answer...

And of course I expect a lot of 'It depends on the game I'm playing' answers, but let's try and be a bit more specific here. I want you to think critically. Ask why you chose to experience a certain game over another depending on your mood/circumstance. I also expect a lot of 'to escape reality' answers or something along those lines, but here I want you to think about what you're escaping from and what you expect a video game will do to help you escape your reality.

Basically I want you guys to ask yourself 'why'. List a few things you'd want to gain from a video game session. I.E. to have fun, to overcome a challenge, to become a powerful badass, to compete and ask yourself 'why do I want to have fun?', 'why do I want to overcome a challenge', 'why do I want to be a badass?'. You might get answers such as 'well, fun is pleasurable, duh', 'I like to be challenged sometimes', or 'I like to be powerful sometimes'. Then you ask yourself 'why is this fun', 'why do I like to be challenged', and 'why do I want to be a badass'. Just keep going with the 'whys' until you get an answer that satisfies you.

I know there are a few threads out there that delve into this stuff, but I'm asking for more than simple answers. I'm not expecting you to give out your life story, just share what you feel comfortable sharing.

My answer is that there are things I learn from video games that I couldn't elsewhere. I could ride a bike to have fun. It would be healthier to do that as often as I play video games. However, video games allow me to roleplay, I get to see from a perspective of someone who's the center of their own universe. In doing so I learn a few things from my own universe. I'm not going to share everything, but what I do expect to gain from a game session is a sense of freedom. I'm not talking about absolute freedom, I'm talking about having a sense of control and ownership that very few people can claim to have in the real world. The idea of 'hey, this is my life and I can accomplish something with the tools at my disposal'. It's a very powerful feeling. It's important to have an imagination and solving a particular challenging situation by wits reinforces the power of imagination over pure knowledge.

I could go on, but mine is just an example. Have fun with this.

I like to get immersed especially with VR one of my favorite things in gaming in this past year is just playing old games in VR. It's like going to a place you been before but this time you can experience it in a whole new way it feels like you are really there at times and that's what I love about gaming right now. The more a game can make me feel forgot my troubles the better I am for it and I don't need hardcore drugs for that not anymore at least.

Yea it definitely varies from game to game. These days I guess the common most basic thread is I want to feel like I've made progress in the game, I want to plow through games and check them off my backlog. The feeling of satisfaction that comes with efficiently completing an area, beating a boss, getting to the next story beat is enough to keep going. When I feel like I'm struggling to make progress I'm not having a good time. This is probably because of the dwindling time I have to actually play games. Every once in a while something comes along that I like to savor and play slow but I'm still having fun so I guess that's what counts.

I like playing dress-up as pretty ladies.

A little bit of immersion into another world. How I get that depends on the game. Some play well, some have a good story, some have great world design.

I want to be engaged and have my attention firmly pointed at something. My default state of procrastination, daydreaming and stray thinking inevitably leads down a dark road of apathy and nihilism. Because I don't know how to shut my brain off, these thoughts will spiral out of control on their own unless I take a break and redirect the mental effort somewhere else. Really engaging with something that demands my full attention is pretty much the thing that keeps me sane. It doesn't neccessarily have to be videogames, but in general they do the best job. I suppose you could call this a form of escapism, but it comes down more to some kind of meditation/refocus than anything else. After an intensely focused gaming session I come out with better peace of mind and can handle the everyday stuff just that bit better.

Games are also an easy and low consequence outlet for experimentation and learning. There's a lot of interesting stuff you can pick up on by abstracting or analyzing games, kind of like the Art of War serves double duty as philosophy for social and military conflict. There's no doubt in my mind that my relationship with games helped immensely in making me as relaxed and confident as I am now.

Is this what you were looking for? I don't really mind talking about it because it's interesting to me personally, but it's easy to see this is a subject a lot of people probably don't want to think too hard about.

Actually with all that said, during them teen years, games were 100% only escapism. It's only the past few years that I've slowly sorted myself out enough to not feel the need to run away anymore. I'm glad I did, the path of pure escape could be a bad scene with my disposition.

I think the thing that initially attracted me towards video games was the idea of them being these weird little oddities that you can prod and poke at. I was like three years old when I first played my older brother's copy of Super Mario 64 (sorry to date myself) and I just remember spending all my time in the courtyard area trying to jump over one of the hills, not realising it served as a wall to restrict you. This was like one of the first video games I had ever played, so it only made sense to me that there must have been more world to explore over that hill.

It was only later on that I began to appreciate things like clever design, depth, satisfying gameplay loops and all the other technical bullshit that people discuss at an almost clinical level. If I'm being real with myself, the games I enjoy most are probably the ones that trigger that feeling I got from playing Super Mario 64 when I was three. It probably has nothing to do with the fact that it was Super Mario 64 specifically that I played, a lot of it was probably just the novelty of playing a video game full stop, let alone a 3D one.

The more games you play over the years, the less novel familiar concepts become. I guess a game really stands out to me nowadays by subverting my expectations. That could be having a unique mechanic, being surprisingly interactive in a very specific way or a heap of other things. Video games are an industry like anything else and that can result in a lot of very similar products. It's the ones that stand out from the crowd that trigger that natural, human curiosity in me to poke and prod at them and be surprised at the results. I guess that's probably why I play games.

@bocckob: Dress up in games is underated. Oh the sweet time I spent as the leader of bokoblins riding a giant horse.

This is very true. One of my favourite games, Spelunky, made me a lot more comfortable with the idea of personal failure and how it can actually be valuable for one's own growth, as wanky as that may sound.

I play Breath of the Wild in order to occupy a beautiful place and accomplish meaningful things there; I want to take ownership of my Hyrule.

Why do you play video games? To escape this wretched plane of insanity.

I am currently accomplishing this with a play-through of Outlast 2, and I don't think it's helping.

It is a form of escapism but it's more an escape from my own constant train of thought than it is an escape from the troubles of reality. @tobbrobb said this pretty well already, but my mind is basically overactive. I have a tendency to want to think about everything at once and all of the possible topics that could be bothering me run through my head over and over again throughout the day. I might busy myself with one task while three others run through my head. Finding something that grabs my attention and absorbs all of that focus, rather than just a portion of it, is a godsend.

Video games aren't the only thing that do it for me, but they get me to focus better than anything else I've found. The occasional movie or anime will do it. Books can. And so does, er, posting on forums, which is part of why my post count is so high.

Different video games take that focus in different ways, however. Skyrim had - still has, actually - a very calming effect on me. All those huge open fields and cold snowy mountains, coupled with that game's somber mood and aesthetic, made it a perfect game for calming my brain after doing college work for hours and wondering if any of it will ever actually pay off (whether it did or not is a different story for a different thread).

On the other hand, I got into Dark Souls with the second game. I bought and played it when I was working at a call center, taking a seemingly endless number of mind-numbing calls. I would get home from that place at like 8:00PM, change clothes, fire up the computer and start playing Dark Souls II, and the complexity and difficulty fed a need for challenge that I'd had for a while. I also played a lot of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive during this time.

I tend to lean towards games that either calm my endless train of thoughts down and just let my brain relax or games that get me hyperfocused on something challenging.

The real problem comes in when I either don't know what to play or I want to play everything. That's usually when I find myself visiting Giantbomb way more often than I should be or just fucking around on the internet.

To kill a bunch of time without noticing how much has gone by until the sun comes back up. Just pure escapism through power fantasy when I have nothing else going on.

...And also to dress up as a pretty lady. Dave said it best: If you're forced to look at the back of a character for 60 hours, it might as well be a female.

To destress. I have a pretty full-on job that is difficult to leave at the door when I go home.

TV does not stop me from thinking about work any more, and I get bored after half an hour with most TV shows.

Gaming, because I actively have to think about what I am doing, does the job for me. It quietens my mind from the stresses of the real world, and is also, of course, fun.

I have recently got into VR, and a good VR game (particularly Rez) gives me a drug-like hit. Weirdly, the motion sickness helps me to fall asleep really quickly, which for an insomniac is a real bonus.