10 Secret Ways Video Games Totally Waste Your Time
How games are designed to steal your time.
Though some might argue that video games are themselves a colossal waste of time, games at their best can be a relaxing and enriching past-time which offers up experiences that no other medium can.
And then there are those games that absolutely, unequivocally have no respect at all for your free time.
In 2020, we as consumers have so many entertainment options available to us - thousands of movies and TV shows available at our finger-tips, and more quality video games than ever before.
And so, players may find themselves becoming increasingly impatient when developers pad their games out with blatant, wildly unnecessary bloat.
In an industry obsessed with justifying that premium AAA price tag, it's extremely common for even the best video games to pad themselves out with additional mechanics, animations, and artificial brick-walls to impede players' speedy progress.
Because developers are desperate to fill their games with "content" at any cost, they typically make aggressive use of these underhanded tactics to keep you tethered to your controller longer than you'd probably like.
Not all wasted time is a bad thing, but in the case of these 10 examples, it's absolutely in the service of tedious busy-work...
10. Forced Walking Sections
One of the more common gaming tropes to emerge in the last decade-or-so is the "forced walk" - that is, a typically on-rails sequence in which the player is forced to walk slowly through a linear area while a support character dumps heaps of exposition on their lap.
Now, the forced walking section isn't always a total waste of time - in fact, it can give players a welcome breather between intense combat sections - but it does prove immensely frustrating when players just want to get down to business.
Some of the more egregious offenders include Gears of War, Assassin's Creed, and Red Dead Redemption 2 to name just a few.
While these sequences are usually infrequent enough, they nevertheless feel like an arbitrary, unnecessary attempt to hold the player back, bringing the game's momentum to a literal slow-crawl in the process.
When repeated numerous times over the course of a 10-20 hour campaign it can amount to a decent chunk of time wasted, all because the devs couldn't find a more interesting or creative way to unfurl the plot.