What bores you the most in games?

Some of the possibilities I've listed below are contradictory, because what bores one person may be the opposite of what bores another. And what bores one person may not bore the same person when they're in the mood for a different style of gameplay.

Feel free to come up with your own new and original causes of boredom.

It goes without saying that game bugs are boring (or worse), so no need to mention them.


So are you bored by...

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Little or no interaction or conversation with characters?

Little or no interaction with the game environment?

Long conversations that have no relevance to solving puzzles and finishing the game?

Superficial conversations that only have relevance to solving puzzles or finishing the game and do nothing to help flesh out the gameworld or make the characters more real?

Being required to talk to characters in a game, when you'd rather do the puzzle solving yourself?

Being required to talk to stupid or annoying characters who can't talk or think like a normal person?

Repetitive comments by your character?

Traipsing back and forth across a large gameworld hunting for new inventory or new conversations that may have been unpredictably triggered by your last action?

Traipsing back and forth across a large gameworld hunting for new inventory or new conversations, even though you know they'd be triggered by your last action?

Having no opportunity to really explore the gameworld because it's a discontinuous series of "zap points."

Having to scan around for inventory in unlikely places in every screen you visit?

Characters that repeat the same conversations whenever you click on them?

Characters that don't repeat conversations, so that if you're called away from the game while playing you have to go back to a save and replay in order to hear what was said?

Action or timed sequences that take several repetitions to get past?

Having to stop frequently to take notes?

Card games or other gambling games inserted in the game that must be played in order to get enough money or chits to progress in the game?

Not being able to look around, either by clicks that rotate you 90

Mazes, just mazes.

Everything can potentially be a good gaming experience if done well.

As far as what aspects stand out in a game as making it truly boring:

Repetition, of anything from environments to puzzles.

Walking through huge worlds with no purpose but to extend your journey from point A to point B. (The Neverhood with its gajillion-screen long room, or even walking through the desert in Uru...

Long load times. I finished Uru and stopped about 2 minutes into the expansion pack after realizing I REALLY didn't want to go around waiting 30 seconds for every world to load, trying to find what I needed to get started.

Saying the same long, repetitive comments every time an inventory item doesn't work. A simple "Nope!" will suffice.

Slow walkers.

Repetition, of anything from environments to puzzles.

Use the box with the chicken. Nope! Use the box with the wrench. Nope! Use the box with the glove. Yay! A Box-ing Glove! Use the boxing glove with the chicken....

(Inventory puzzles are fine when they make sense. Hence Monkey Island 2 bugged me...slightly...)

Games with no music and/or sound.

Repetition, of anything....well, you get the picture.

I'm sure there are more. <img border="0" alt="[yawn]" title="" src="graemlins/yawn.gif" />

For me it's unskippable cut scenes. They drive me crazy! I'll sit there hitting every key on my keyboard hoping that one of them will work.

Oh mannnnn! I love the cut scenes.


What bores me personally would be the game as a whole if it doesn't capture my interest. <img border="0" alt="[yawn]" title="" src="graemlins/yawn.gif" />
Inferno

That's quite a list, Jenny100, and yet I've heard every one of those points being griped about at one time or another.

Having to complete an arcade or card game sequence in order to move on is aggravating rather than boring for me. I'm engaged in the action and getting tenser by the minute, especially when I'm losing! Frequent dying in a game also gets me very uptight.

I think long intro. scenes that can't be skipped and long load times can be rather mind numbing.

Reading, reading, and more reading.

Talking, talking, and more talking. (TLJ!)
Rusty

I get bored when I already figured out what to do and it won't let you because you haven't talked to someone or been somewhere that would have given you a clue to do exactly what you were trying to do in the first place.

This soured more than one game for me that otherwise was fun.

Little or no interaction with the game environment?

Jack the Ripper comes to mind. I thought the whole game was kinda boring till the end. I wanted to click on everything I saw on the streets and in the rooms. I couldnt get anything except what was important to the game. I guess I like a good pixel hunt and carrying inventory.(except ladders)

Little or no interaction or conversation with characters. I have no interest in Myst or the inumerable clones. I like conversations. I like showing everything in my inventory to characters and getting a funny response.

I like sudden, strange deaths, but then I started adventuring with Sierra's Space Quests. So walking around a jungle maze in which absolutely nothing happening, in Beyond Atlantis had me bored almost to tears.

Action and timed sequences don't bore me, they make me angry.

I lose interest in a game that has too much repetition whether it's conversations where you have to listen to them again and again or traveling back and forth constantly over the same terrain. The to and fro thing I'm talking about is the kind where you have a cut scene constantly to repeat or any more than 3 "steps" to get back and forth. I don't mind the maps where you click and you're there but my eyes glaze over after the 2nd trip on "foot".

happy trails,

Carolyn

I like cutscenes, too...the first time. But when you have to go back to an earlier point or want to replay something and are FORCED to sit through them again...well that drives me nuts.

Hi

I think practically everything boring has been covered already but it is somehow really satisfying to know that loads of other people besides me get bored by similar stuff

As you said, Jenny, we're all different, but I found several of those items you listed boring, especially games where you wander around looking for stuff that was triggered by something else, except you don't have a clue what or where it is.

One thing that wasn't mentioned: games whose characters are hard to understand, and there are no subtitles...

Use the box with the chicken. Nope! Use the box with the wrench. Nope! Use the box with the glove. Yay! A Box-ing Glove! Use the boxing glove with the chicken....
___________________~Demosthenes~________________

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!! OMG! I have played so MANY of those! I actually find those types of inventory puzzles pretty comical!

________________________________________________

What bores ME the most are the following:

1. Long load times...yuk...they destroy the immersiveness too (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets comes to mind)

2. Repetitive conversations that you CANNOT skip through if you've heard them before, and characters that repeat themselves word for word TOO MUCH (it's okay once or twice, but EVERY time you talk to them??) This is the case in so MANY games that no one particular comes to mind. It's a tolerable fault, but a bit annoying at times.

3. Gameplay that is SO open-ended that you have no sense of direction or purpose...I don't like just wandering around wondering what to do next (RIVEN comes to mind)...for ME, THIS one is the WORST...I WANT A SENSE OF PURPOSE, dang it!!!

4. Myst and Myst clones (EXILE being the exception)

5. Puzzles that require a degree in bio-physics or space engineering...I am NOT, nor will I ever BE, a rocket scentist...so (OBSIDIAN and SCHIZM come to mind) please keep it at a bachelor's degree level or less (for THIS adventure/rpg'er anyway)

6. Characters that you control, but that have one gait...S-L-O-W...all characters should be able to run!

7. A clumsy and awkward interface (this will usually bore me so in the length of TIME it takes to figure it OUT...I'll usually just say the heck with it and uninstall the game)

I think you all have covered it all.

Josie

To generalize, I find the most boring everything,
what developers put into the game for the purpose of making the gameplay longer.

You will immediately know it, when you meet it because you usually lose the sense of immersion. It can be puzzle, it can be uninspiring maze, it can be an action scene. I love all of the previous mentioned as long as I feel, that they are integrated in the game. But when I have to walk 10000 screens from point B back to point A, even after I was in A million times and the game didn't allow me to pick item C until I really get to point B where person D tells me to pick C in A I immediately know how it was in developing process.

Writer 1: So I think our game is ready.
Programmer: It's ready and implemented.
Beta tester: I needed 7.5 hours to finish the game.
Programmer: hmmm, we don't have time to invent more puzzles, so what if we just move some triggers far away so player has to walk a really long way.
Writer: Ah, this is great idea.
Graphic Artist: Oh yes, and they will look at my beautiful graphic again and again and again... mwahahahaha
Writer: So the most distant places are A and B so let's move the item C from B back to A
Programmer: Ok, back to work.
Team leader: And don't forget to take out the map from the game. We don't want them to easily transport from one place to another.
Programmer: Ok.

I knew that's what was happening - Let's go get them and smack on them for a while

I suppose what bores me is awkward interfaced puzzles, inordinate pixel hunts or hot spots right on top of each other which causes endless searching.

I like reading if it can be done when you like - as in put the document or a transcript of it in your inventory - or if it is very hint/plot info laden. If it is one long dissertation to wade through - uhmmm I'll wait for the movie.

I get bored if there are no people at all or at least "sense of people" in a game. In DarkFall there were no tangible people but lots of delectible voices and characters. In Rhem I found myself running after that guy yelling but "Wait!! Who can I hang out with if you leave....come back!!!"

Yep..I think everything has been covered, the one thing I can think of that drives me crazy..A game where there are timed/difficult sequences,and you cannot save where you want, "it" saves for you..you get through the difficult part [finally] then a little later "trip over a log" and you are dead and have to do the whole thing over!!! Glynn

I HATE having to revisit places over and over again because something you need at point B needds to be used at point C , then you have to go to B again to get something for A, etc etc. It doesnt bother me so much in the detective type games ( like PostMortem, Jack the Ripper) but it bugs me in the Myst type games ( I am playing Crystal Key 2 now , and I already sick of that jetpack!)

Even in Riven and Shivers, walking, walking, walking to do a task got to me.

Titantic had the best idea, a jump map. You didn't have to walk the entire ship, you just went to the map and the map put you where you wanted to be. ;( Any other games like that?

~Dee

[kidding mode on] Well, there you are. Everybody hates adventure games. No wonder they don't sell. Let's all go play checkers. [off]

Seriously now, if you were a developer reading this thread, what would you do?

Some things you mentioned I may find annoying, but not boring. (mazes for example). I find it boring if there is little or no interaction with other characters, or if there isn't a stong story. Sometimes I can't put my finger on what I find boring, but some games just don't have that special somthing that pulls me into the story.

I don't like games with a lot of 'back & forth' movement with no real understading of what I'm doing.

Louis