Anyone ever take a huge break from gaming?

[jfrost]

From 2003-2009, I mostly didn't touch games (I did play some, very sporadically). I went through the worst stages of my life money-wise, there were times I didn't have anything to eat. Only later things got a little better.

Then I went to the United States, got some money and bought a PS2 and some games.

[timmyl33]

From age 14 to 17 i took a big break starting hanging out with friends partying and playing sports then i got a 360 for christmas with gow and been gaming and collecting ever since. This site also encouraged me to get into collecting and other games i would of never tried if it wasnt for racketboy

[dlmvii]

From about August of last year to March of this one, the only game I really played was Quake Live. I fell in love with board games during that time though, so I played a lot of those (and continue to do so!), but it's very tough to find people that want to play them as much as I do.

[isiolia]

Never really intentionally, and never really entirely.

First I could probably point to is when I headed off to college in '98. I brought no consoles with me. My new PC had NT 4.0 on it, eventually dual booted with FreeBSD, which made space for a Win98 install (for Direct3D games) a bit tight. NT ran a fair number of games, but only OpenGL for 3D acceleration.
I still gamed, but my selections were pretty well dictated by what ran on NT 4 - overall dominated by mutiplayer FPS with people from my dorm, that sort of thing. Then again, I went from having a modem to having high speed ethernet, so suddenly having the option of online gaming was pretty novel. The occasional null modem game or dial-up match of Mechwarrior 2 just didn't compare.

I still kept up with the industry, to a point, and messed with some emulators, but what I actually played was fairly limited for a couple years.

When I moved off-campus a couple years later, I brought my consoles down and wound up working at Software Etc for almost a year. Bought quite a bit in that time, though most of what I actually played was social stuff like fighters. Actually going to classes, having a job, etc meant that I played less of what I bought than the people I lived with >_>;


There's also the fairly extended period where I played FFXI - again kept up with the market, and certainly spent an inordinate amount of time playing video games...just, not a whole lot outside of that one game. For the first few years I barely bought much else, though when I got my current job in '06 I started buying more, just still not playing a lot of it very much.

Stopped playing XI a few months ago, and have been trying to cut into my backlog a bit since then.

[J T]

There was a period from my birth until about age 4 where I didn't play video games at all! I don't know how I survived those years. I don't remember and I don't know if I want to!

[Xeogred]

There was a period from my birth until about age 4 where I didn't play video games at all! I don't know how I survived those years. I don't remember and I don't know if I want to!

I'm with JT on this one and kind of surprised by most of the replies here. The longest I'll go without games pretty much within the last 20 or so years, is maybe a week or a few weeks from time to time. Sometimes I get really caught up in anime, or other things that keep me busy instead, but I doubt I've ever gone a month or so without playing a videogame.

[BoneSnapDeez]

Sometimes I get really caught up in anime, or other things that keep me busy instead, but I doubt I've ever gone a month or so without playing a videogame.

Well that's how I am these days. I try to play an hour of video games a night (more on Fridays and Saturdays), but will take the night off if I'm reading manga or watching anime.

[gtmtnbiker]

I had a long break. About ~1993 until 2008, so about 15 years. It wasn't completely game free because I'm sure I played some Doom/Duke Nukem/Castle Wolfenstein at work and some Minesweeper and such games that came with Windows. I was occupied by skiing, mtn biking, tennis, racquetball, relationships, and kids. I got back into it when my oldest daughter requested a Nintendo DS.

I probably average about an hour a day, mostly on the DSi XL.

So just before I took a hiatus, I had a Sega Genesis with like 3-4 games so I wasn't really that serious like I was during my pre-teen/teenage years (Atari 2600/Atari 800). I was also a major pirate with the 800, going to libraries with other like minded kids to swap copied games or spending time downloading them from a BBS.

Gaming is fun but it's good to have a variety of interests.

[Inazuma]

The longest break I ever took from gaming was when I was around 12 years old and my parents took all of my video games away from me temporarily as punishment for "playing games too much." I wanna say that the punishment lasted 3 or 4 weeks.

By the way, all it did was make me want to play video games even more. I felt so horrible having everything taken away from me like that. Video games have been and always will be my favorite thing in life. I still am upset at my parents for doing that to me.

Forced breaks aside, the longest break from gaming I've had was probably 1 week or so. I'm the kind of gamer who usually carries a portable game system on him at all times. Right now it's my 3DS.

[AppleQueso]

...for 'playing games too much'? Really? THAT's IT, YOU'RE ENJOYING YOURSELF TOO MUCH. YOU'RE GROUNDED.

I could maybe understand if they felt it was affecting your grades at school or something, but if 'playing games too much' is all it was then that's just ridiculous