Time has no meaning here.

[Bizzaro Stormy]

So I remember many years ago that my older brother bought a copy of Civilization: Call To Power. We both loved that game and dedicated many hours to the joy of conquering the Earth and building all the city upgrades we could. The crazy thing about it was that if you sat down for a quick game, you would look up and realize that 5 hours or more had passed! I can't remember another game that I played that just sucked me in so much that the rest of the world slipped away. Has anyone else had this sort of experience with a game?

 

[Silvanus]

I used to lose hours in games without realising, but recently I've been a little obsessive about monitoring how long I spend.


...though yesterday, I lost three hours without realising it reading a manhwa.

 

[Guffe]

This happens mainly with (J)RPGs these days. Not so much else. I've noticed I can't keep concentrating for too long times at once when playing. Like how kids have ot have something to do all the time... sort of opposit that, need to calm down a little :/

back in the day it would be WarcraftIII and Lotro that had this effect on me.

 

[iseko]

Rome total war. Although I guess that is a similar concept. I think it is mostly because there is no real division into chapters. You have no loading screens. Nothing that makes u look at your watch.

 

[Angelous Wang]

All RTS/TBS's and RPG's basically.

All my steam playtimes on CIV and Elder Scrolls games are in the hundreds.

 

[putowtin]

I was a huge Sims fan (yeah yeah, casual gamer, shut it!) and used to loose days to it, then I just stopped playing.

This weekend I tried the sims 4 for the first time, spent four hours on it (which with that game is just long enough to build a house) I enjoyed it, but not enough to buy it.

 

[Bizzaro Stormy]

I used to lose hours in games without realising, but recently I've been a little obsessive about monitoring how long I spend.


...though yesterday, I lost three hours without realising it reading a manhwa.

I've found that scheduling an hour or two for game playing is a good way to avoid loosing track of time. Also making certain to check my watch every level or so helps!

 

[Just Ebola]

World of Warcraft. I think it was designed to make people forget about the passage of time.

At least I got to skip most of puberty.

 

[bliebblob]

Oh yeah, 4x's and especially civ are notorious for that. The heroes of might and magic series is just as bad. I think it has something to do with how one way or the other you always feel like you're on the brink of something major. If it's a problem there's an easy solution though, as others have already pointed out: set a timer.

 

[Evonisia]

The Zombies mode of CoD: World at War, Black Ops and Black Ops II. Especially more so in the former most because of the brilliant atmosphere, but I could just get lost performing the same six or so actions over and over in a desperate bid to hold off the undead. Oh the match is over? Time to grab a drink quickly before the next one starts! Oh dear I'm feeling tired, better check the time, what? Seven hours have passed? Oh dear... gotta keep playing.

A similar fate befell me with The Last of Us strangely enough. I first started playing it at 9pm but after a while I decided to check the time in case it was too late. Lo and behold it was 3am, how did that happen?

 

[sageoftruth]

God Hand does that for me. Everything in the game seems to tempt me to continue playing. When I'm in a stage, I want to overcome the enemies and reach the end. When I reach the end, I want to see what's next. When I reach the end of a world, I want to purchase new abilities. When I've purchased new abilities, I want to test them out on the enemies in the next world, and suddenly, where did the time go?

 

[ZZoMBiE13]

More than once I've spent an entire Sunday on whatever RTS happened to have it's hooks in me at the time. Most notably was Red Alert 2. That was probably my favorite of all. Once the expansion came along, it had enough interesting units between it's 3 factions that I could spend hours meticulously building a base.

Other notable games that ate hours of my life: Star Wars- Galactic Battlegrounds, Age Of Empires, WarCraft 3, StarCraft, and C&C3: Tiberium War. Each of these were time eaters in the worst way. Each got it's hooks into me and kept me fully engaged for hours on end.

 

[sageoftruth]

I should also add new games. By "new" I mean a game I just started playing for the first time. I'm wary of playing a game for the first time, since I know I'll probably end up dedicating countless hours to it before I'm able to moderate my game time. Novelty is a powerful drug.

 

[sageoftruth]

I used to lose hours in games without realising, but recently I've been a little obsessive about monitoring how long I spend.


...though yesterday, I lost three hours without realising it reading a manhwa.

I'd love to have your new obsession. At nights, I often go to bed and then decide to quickly check something on youtube on my phone and suddenly at least an hour has gone by. It really messes with my sleep schedule.

 

[Barbas]

Freelancer. I was trying to find a secret worm hole that a friend told me about years ago. They gave me vague grid coordinates and said it was in "one of the Tau or Omega systems". I was disappointed not to find it, but in the end the quest was a pretty amazing one - I found dark dust and ice clouds that concealed hidden bases; the wreck of the Hispania, a sleeper ship from the game's opening; old mine fields, turret platforms and fighter wrecks bordering a huge open battleground between the two largest warring pirate factions and a massive exploded star that billowed hull-chewing radiation into the surrounding system. Awesome space.

 

[TallanKhan]

Most Grand Strategy games do this for me. I was a Call to Power player as well, although I preferred Call to Power 2. Also Master of Orion 2 was awesome.

More recently, I have kinda had a Minecraft kick and have had a few sessions where I have just lost all track of time.

 

[Madame_Lawliet]

Team Fortress 2 used to do that for me, when I was in high school I would literally come home, eat something, put all the Daft Punk albums in a playlist or something, load up TF2 and when I looked up it was four in the morning.
Hell, I lost an entire summer to that game between my junior and senior year, kinda makes it all the more painful that I find TF2 rather boring when I try to play it now, but when you play a game compulsively like that you're kinda setting yourself up for burnout.

Also I personally found LittleBigPlanet(2) to be a bit of a time eater, if nothing else then because of just how much user-made content there is, for better or for worse.

 

[DrunkOnEstus]

Happened recently with Witcher 2. I want to be ready for the Wild Hunt, but I can't for the life of me play the first one and I would always hit a wall in the second one in Flotsam. Once I played it a certain way and quit being OCD about every recipe and herb and craft and made myself become Geralt of Rivia, bam. I see the sun coming up through the blinds and I'm wondering where the hell all those hours went. I can't wait to jump back into it now after I take care of some work, and the Wild Hunt seems even better than I was feeling it would be before.

Edit: I forgot the obvious with Demon's/Dark Souls. It doesn't happen with Dark 2 because it feels more "gamey" and I have less of that kinesthetic projection onto my character or whatever, but damn can those games make the real world just halt for awhile. Having a kid has made future runs more scheduled and "worked for", making them all the sweeter. On that note about having a kid though...I instantly became a member of the "figure out how to put in a fucking pause button" party.