Factorio. I blinked and a month went by the first time I played it. It ruins my sleep schedule like no other.

Absolutely love it

Minecraft, holy shit, I have a singleplayer, creative world that I spent hours every day building on for 8 years or so.

That map is gigantic, and I even saved it from a hard disk crash

AuDHD means every game is part of an addiction phase. I will binge a game for like 100hrs then drop it out of nowhere. Then return right where I left off anywhere between 6 months and 4 years later.

I spent over a decade addicted to World of Warcraft. Like, I would come home from work and immediately jump on WoW and do nothing else until bedtime.

Thankfully, Activision buying out Blizzard and then ruining the game made me eventually quit. I've tried to go back, but I can't get into it anymore. It's just no fun.

The last few expansions, I've spent a week burning through the main questline, then I walk away until they announce another expansion. Endgame content is not interesting enough to keep me after the main story is over. I never even finished the last two expansions; I checked out partway into the story. I think I'm officially done buying expansions for WoW and hoping I can get back into it.

Other games that I've been addicted to in recent times have been Satisfactory and Enshrouded. Both base building games that have no end, but rely on your creativity to enjoy.

I have ADHD (the hyperfocus type) and Satisfactory really scratches that itch. Focusing on minute details, trying to make a seamless, efficient, organized factory to produce an end product. And the sky's the limit (literally). You can build hundreds of factories across a massive map and get really creative about style, design, efficiency, etc. it's a really fun creative game.

Enshrouded is the same, except instead of efficient factories, you're building homes, villages, castles, etc. in a fantasy medieval setting. With questing and monsters and magic too! It's been loads of fun and my friends and I have been super addicted to that game for a while now too. I actually just posted a review about it in games@lemmy.world yesterday.

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On a side note, I find it interesting to see Minecraft mentioned a lot in this thread. That game first came out when I was in my 20s (I'm in my 40s now) and it was pretty popular when it first dropped. I played it a bit, but besides running around and digging (mining?) a bit, there wasn't really any direction or goals or anything, so I kind of lost interest. I found out years later there's a whole endgame to it, but without any in-game directions, there was no way I would've ever progressed in that game without online help.

Decades later, Minecraft got a resurgence of popularity with younger generations and now it's suddenly the game of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. One of my baby nephews is addicted to that game now and speaks of almost nothing but Minecraft. Crazy how it can continue being so popular across multiple generations like that.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon. Spent years on that one.

I think most here are too generous with the term addiction.

I had to uninstall Hearthstone years ago, because I compulsively played it multiple hours every single day, despite not really having fun playing it anymore. It was either grinding to get cards or tilting on ladder. That's what I would call an addiction.

Edit: After Hearthstone I played a lot of Slay the Spire and after that Marvel Snap. Never more then I enjoyed it, so I wouldn't count those.

Stardew Valley. I have it on my computer and switch. I even made myself a perfection guide.

Rocket league. Scrolled all the comments and slightly disappointed to not find this one :/

This was a game I was truly addicted. Uninstalled it many times recognising it as an addiction but kept coming back to it. I feel lucky that I could break out of it. It was THAT addictive. Around 1200-1300hrs on that game.

Short term: Dishonored and Far Cry 3. I beat Dishonored in a day and then turned around and beat it again. I played Far Cry 3 for like 22 hours straight, took a nap, and then beat it.

Long term: New Vegas. The same problem with Dishonored, where it was so good I had to turn around and beat it again as soon as I got done. The problem being, there's hundreds of ways to play through New Vegas. So I put about 11 full playthroughs with all DLC in on the PS3 version. Essentially back to back to back.

Fallout. I played 1 and 2 back when they first came out. Great games, great writing, seditious humour ad a real feel of a world.

But then came 3, FNV, and 4. Each of those I played through as my default 'helpful stealth archer' character, then a second time as 'evil melee' character, and then again to make sure I had maxed out each faction and got each ending. And then again, because I loved it, and again to collect all the bobbleheads, magazines, etc.

I'm in my late-50s. I'm already slowing down my career in preparation for retirement, and now I work as a freelance consultant which means I have some control over my working hours. I can't wait for Fallout 5. I will be probably take at least two weeks off work to binge the shit out of it.

Less so with Elder Scrolls 6, but I'll be taking at least a week off to play it when it drops.

Modded Factorio. I did 450 hours of pyAnodon's recently and it just broke me. I didn't win the game. I feel like I lost at it and life.

It seems impossible to manage the side products properly. Ridiculous amount of materials that are all interrelated means that if you are low on one thing, it is very hard to fix it because you need the thing to work to make anything.

Too many recipes means it is very difficult to make modular, adaptable designs to copy and paste. Advanced recipes seem better, but they end up just exacerbating the issue even more.

Hades, I spent like 6 months playing almost nothing else. Platinumed it and still couldn't get enough, and I'm not even that good at it!ಥ_ಥ I managed to get to 25 heat I think.

I used to play Tetris on my OG monochrome Gameboy obsessively. I would go through stages where I'd put a fresh set of batteries in and play until they went flat in one go. The only limiting factor on my game time was the availability of AA batteries in the vicinity. It got to the point where I'd be dreaming about playing it, and when putting things away I'd stack things Tetris style and get angry when things wouldn't fit together cleanly.

Then one day I just stopped and never felt the urge again. Thank goodness.

For me, this only happens in story-based games. The most recent was Expedition 33. It’s also the first time a videogame has ever made me cry. What an incredible ride that was.

I wasted some 2-3 years of my life in CSGO too when I was younger. All my free time, down the drain basically. It wasn’t even fun after a while, just a hard, tiring grind. Attempted to compete on semi-pro level, somehow got it to my head that it was possible. Did compete ultimately, but none of my teams made it. Never got anywhere and the day I finally got off it was the best day of my adult life. It was bad.

I feel ashamed to admit this out loud. It’s just so cringeworthy. But it does some good to keep my head level and remember the shortcomings of my younger days.

Nowadays the closest I get to “addiction” level is bingeing a few months worth of evenings on the likes of Crusader Kings 3, M&B Bannerlord, Stellaris or Rimworld. Much more sane since it’s not as intensive, it can be paused at any moment, and ultimately there’s an end to it, so it just naturally withers away from my days eventually.

The worst for me was elder scrolls: oblivion. I played it on xbox back when it came out. I played nothing else for about 18 months. I must have had thousands of hours by the time it got old.

Nothing will ever hook me as badly as Kerbal Space Program did. If I wasn't at work, I was playing Kerbal for five years straight. No breaks, didn't play anything else during that time. Once I got RealSolarSystem and RealismOverhaul working, you couldn't pry me away from the computer. I put in aver 10,000 hours, easily.

At different times:

Luanti (AKA Minetest)

0AD

Sauerbraten

Battle for Wesnoth

Shattered Pixel Dungeon

and further back:

Action Quake 2

WipeOut 2097 (AKA XL)

For a while it was Elite Dangerous. Reached triple Elite, then eventually Odyssey drops and I stopped playing. After Elite was Baldurs Gate 3. Bg3 was the fastest 1000+ hours I’ve ever dropped in a video game

I love this thread, so many people passionate about their experiences with games makes me happy.

Factorio. At my worst, I was seeing conveyor belt patterns in my sleep.

Civilization, Civilization 2, Civilization 3 and FreeCiv

Just one more turn. Looks up. Where did the day go?

I finally kicked the habit with FreeCiv.

Cracktorio

I bought No Man's Sky about a year ago. There's something comforting in the repeated tasks and exploring. I spend entire days just running around accomplishing nothing.

Original World of Warcraft.

I put years into that game. Then I started a family and I just had to quit.

If my gf (now wife) played we'd probably never get anything done.

Sadly, Fall Guys. Little did I know when I started playing it when it released for free on PSN that it would become my most played game of all time. Having 8 of us to make 2 complete teams with every night was a lot of fun. It was just an easy game to play, but not think while playing and just talk with friends for an hour or 2 a night. Some of the funniest conversations I've ever had was during this game. This month marks 5 years of playing this on average 5 times a week. Sadly this year we all finally drifted and I barely played the last few months but maybe once or twice a week and with 1 or 2 others on a good night. 5 years is crazy long for me, so I will be shocked if we find anything else that grabs us like this ever again, but im hoping.

Path of Exile. And by extension Path of Building.

I've only played like 8 leagues (each league is around 3 months long) and I have almost 5k hours :/.

Usually if I decide to play a league, i will make sure I have no obligations for an entire month and then I will take the first week of the league off work.

Morrowind was my big single player addiction. Oblivion and Skyrim were cool but they just never hit quite right.

Multiplayer I was heavy into Halo and Rappelz (some Korean MMO). I woke my brother up by sleep-playing halo, sat in front of the TV wiggling my thumbs on air, and shouted "THEYVE GOT THE FLAG". And would frequently have dreams where the conversation is being held in a floating chat box from rappelz.

It's a toss up between Hardspace: Shipbreaker, My time At Portia and Just Cause 3 for me. Three very different games. Floaty slicey boom, cute engineer mining and grapple fly shooty basically 🤣

Also very much in an "addiction phase" for the demo of G-Rebels which sadly goes away on Sunday 😥

So many. To list some that aren't in the top comments:

Foxhole - This one gets to a point where it becomes an obligation. It feels like work that I'm not getting paid for. And still I'll easily get sucked into defending a town or advancing a front for days on end between periods of burnout, checking statuses at work and staying up way past my bedtime, decimating my sleep schedule and productivity in the process.

Don't Starve Together - My partner and I took a week off and were supposed to go camping but we ended up playing this too late the night before we were supposed to leave. We woke up really early to pack the car and it took about five minutes for us to go, "nope, this ain't happening". So instead we spent the entire week locked in our apartment playing DST from the moment we woke up to the early hours of the morning and living off of our camping provisions.

League of Legends - I played a lot of LoL back in its early days. My dorm had awful internet so when I came home for the summer it was pretty much all I would do all day every day. It brought out a bad side of me. Losing felt awful and winning was never satisfying enough. I've been clean from LoL for over 10 years now. Sometimes I still think about downloading it but I've so far kept the strength.

Dota without question. CS along with some rts games like zero hour and CoH used to be up there but it's not even close. Got to a ranked immortal at my peak. Still, was a lot of fun playing with friends and family, so not like it was always a solo activity. Glad I quit though.

Minecraft, on a server with friends. We still play it

Dark Souls 1 and Hollow Knight

I once calculated my Minecraft hours across all platforms I've played on and it's over HALF A YEAR. I was like mega addicted in middle school, I still play often.

servers SUCK now though, they're all pay to win and have custom texture packs that look horrible :(

the best one I've found (that isn't private) is UltraVanilla, and I actually found it from firefoxes "Minecraft Indy wiki redirect" plugin which crashed once and there was a little box on the side which mentioned the server bc the person that made the plugin is an admin of the server. When I joined the discord I had already interacted with several members from other modding discords.
As far as I know im the ONLY person that checked it out due to that popup lol

I don't play on that server because some friends made a different (private) server.

Quake (any), Dyson Sphere Program, Path of Exile. Those are the big three, many others had smaller but intense addiction phases.

Project Zomboid. I have over 1000 hours of playtime. I always come back to this game.

I was supposed to be working on a project the day terraria released on Steam. I ended up playing it for like 9 hours straight

Most games that spark a Tetris Effect with me, where I'm still playing them in my mind while I've put them down hours ago, are industrial automation games. So the likes of Factorio, Satisfactory, Captain Of Industry.

Dwarf Fortress. I think I have ten thousand hours in the classic game.

Oxygen Not Included for the same reasons. I really like games where you both design, and are affected by, complex ecosystems

My most played Steam game is hilariously Tametsi. It's a Minesweeper spin-off with different layouts and shapes and zero guessing required for its ~200 puzzles. Some of the later puzzles require some absolutely bonkers chains of logic to figure out. It helps there's a fantastic YouTube series of videos by innocentive going through puzzle solutions that are some of the most relaxing and entertaining things I've ever watched. He almost always points to the next thing you need to consider first, so you can just pause a video after he mentions where the next step is and follow the logic yourself rather than spending hours hunting for it.

Pretty much everything I’ve ever played. Going all-in on a new hobby for periods of time (before cycling to another interest weeks later) is just how my brain works.

But right now? I’m very into playing Surviving Mars. Something about escaping from Earth and creating a new society on another planet just feels so appealing right now, for some reason. Nervously glances at news headlines

About 20 years ago I played world of warcraft every day and every awaken hour of the day or just about. School was over and I lived with my parents and was "looking for work". Let's just say that I played vanilla so much that I had guild members calling in the middle of the night to get together for world boss killing.

Since then I have realized that is not how to go about in life and last time i really got stuck was with Factorio.

Tetris Effect Master Mode

Have you tried Tetris The Grand Master 4? Came out a just a few months ago.

I'm sorry/you're welcome.

Payday 2 probably takes the gold medal for me. I was once playing casually with a friend of me after work, chatting about the day, and when we were about to finish the level we noticed that we damn near broke the world record for that level, a record made by 4 players.

DOTA 2, man. Once you get past the massive learning curve, there is just so much to do in-game. Every match is entirely unique, with constant updates, tournaments, battle passes, and what have you. When I feel like disappearing, I disappear into DOTA.

Factorio, Europa Universalis IV, Victoria 3, Baldur's Gate 3 when it was new, and special shout-out to Outer Wilds which hooked me unforgettably

Skyrim, Destiny, Destiny 2, Valheim

Right now I'm really hooked on Lucky Tower Ultimate. I've never been this into anything like it before, roguelites mostly bore me, but this game has such a goofy charm and - for an Early Access game - surprisingly deep explorability. It's my go-to game for picking up my Steam Deck and screwing around for 20 minutes or an hour. I'm still having a ton of fun with it.

I probably have more hours in Diablo 2 than any other game.

I didn't buy the remaster because I value having a life now.

Well I'm old and don't really game anymore, but for me it was the original Halflife. The story sucked me in, not to mention the fact that I was running it on my brand new PC, which I believe was one of the first Pentium IIIs, so I could run it at the max resolution and the graphics were amazing!. I think it was 1024x768, on a huge 17" CRT monitor!

Eve online

So many, it's generally how it goes for me as I mostly play one game at a time. But some that have REALLY made me dive deep and play many hours a day for long times: Halo 1, 2, 3 and Reach, Elder Scrolls Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, Minecraft, Terraria, Starbound, Satisfactory, Forza Horizon 4 and 5, Rocket League. There are many more, these are just what I thought of at the moment.
And the one I still play a ton and see no end in sight is Warframe, such a good game, and both the community and the devs are awesome so even after getting 1,200 hours in two years I'm still giddy about it and have so much fun.

I was in university and had just passed my midterms and as a treat for myself picked up both KOTORs. Mainlined that shit.

Minesweeper. I've had a period where I played it 3 hours a day. Eventually forced myself to delete it from my phone.

League of legends, yes I am a toxic person

Battle pass shit aside, I really like Apex Legends. Probably has some dark patterns but still I really like their gunfights.

Diablo 2, Skyrim, BL2, BL3, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, Valheim, V Rising, Oblivion Remastered, D3, and now Helldivers 2. Roughly in order.

Dwarf Fortress.
I would constantly miss meals and sleep to keep playing. Sometimes multiple days at a time. Went like 36 hours without eating or sleeping until someone popped into vent and asked what I was up to and after hearing me talk about the Fortress the asked when the last time I ate was...

850 hours on Skyrim and counting.

I seem to have it under control now.

historically: gmod. recently: oxygen not included.

Souls games.

Elden Ring opened up the whole FromSoft catalog for me, im playing Demons Souls now

Path of exile for sure. Everytime there is a new league, i put a lot of hours into it.

Valkyrie Chronicles, I legitimately called off work sick for 2 days when the game came out on ps3.

Subnautica, Witcher 3, Far Cry 4, Metro Exodus, Dead By Daylight so far

The most severe was Warframe. Not the most hours, but the most hours in the shortest time. 200 hours in 2 weeks. No I didn't do anything else.

Other than that, Runescape, Minecraft, Baldur's gate 3 all have just deleted days. Runescape and Minecraft have deleted months if not a year of time.

Urban Terror, it has such a high skill ceiling. Spent many hours just happily running jump maps, let alone all the thousand of games. Thinking of going back.

No Man's Sky. Keeps drawing me in.

Homeworld 1, 2, Cataclysm. Forget the latest one.

Need for Speed Most Wanted.

Horizon 1 & 2

So many more...

For the entirety of high school I only played Team Fortress 2, League of Legends, and Melee. I have 2000+ hrs in TF2 and probably more in the other two. Then in college I was on the Overwatch team and played in the college league, I have a bit under 5000 hrs in that.

No games I have come close to that kinda play time and none probably will since I have less time to game and I’ve kinda been losing interest in gaming in general.

Dungeon Master on the Amiga 500 was probably the first, followed by the SSI silver-box Krynn series. Moving over to IBM-compatibles, Sim City ate a ton of my time. SC2k, various AD&D games, and eventually FPS games (especially Team-Fortress-Likes) came to eat up wayyyy too much of my time. My first MMO was FFXI and it ate about every waking moment I was not otherwise occupied. At work, I was looking up gear locations, mobs spawns, etc. and talking on forums. I would later go on to work in the MMO space and played a lot of them for work. Rift: Planes of Telara from alpha until the (first?) major revamp was the last game to really do that to me. Ever since, I will get briefly addicated to games, but nothing lasts... and that's probably good with everything else I have going on. I do get super into Skyrim once ever couple years, though, and put an unhealthy amount of time into it.

Horizon series

Mass Effect series

Borderlands series

Way back in the day it was Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC), Star Wars The Old Republic, then Guild Wars 2

Team Fortress 2 and Splatoon

I have probably over 3k hours on Splatoon. I can't stop. I'm S+8 fwiw

If we’re talking actual legit addiction, to the point of finding it hard to quit, Skyrim and Pokémon (first four generations). Any other game, no matter how much I love it or how many hours I’ve got, I could put away and not touch for a while. When I first got into Skyrim, I played it nonstop for about 3 or 4 years, hours a day every day. After around 5k hours I finally had a hard drive failure which corrupted a save file and I finally took that as a sign to stop playing. I actually stopped playing video games entirely for a while to make sure I didn’t go back to it. About a year ago I figured I’d reinstall it and play again for a bit, immediately sank 50 hours in and uninstalled it before I fell into that rabbit hole again.

Pokemon is similar, though not as bad. But any time I revisit a Pokemon game I have to go through all the games in the first four gens, get super into it with dozens of tabs on individual Pokemon and stats and such, and then I have to stop myself, otherwise I’d probably do the same thing as Skyrim. As a kid growing up I was properly addicted to that series, and as an adult it still hasn’t gone away.

There’s lots of other games I’ve had tons and tons of hours into, but I could hang them up and move on. Skyrim especially but Pokemon too are actual addictions for me.

Mu online.

I remember one summer break I slept 2 hrs a day and played while eating. Basically my life revolved around that game. I got to top of the server and realized wtf am I doing. I kind of glad it happened because it was the start of breaking free from addiction.

Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, Derail Valley Simulator, Terraria, and Vintage Story.

Definitely animal well. When I played it out was the coolest sense of discovery that I had ever felt playing a game, and it kept going for so long. I would play it whenever I had a spare minute, especially if I had an idea for a puzzle. I'm not great at normal puzzle games, my brain just doesn't work like that, but I love exploration and easy puzzles and animal well really scratched that itch for me in a way no other game has.

Aside from that, I wouldn't be surprised if I had like 10,000 hours in Minecraft, since that's pretty much the only video game I like to play, and I've been playing it for almost ten years. Not an addiction though, I only play when I have the time and the desire.

Timberborn is my drug of choice right now. But every few months I have a No Man's Sky relapse.

Monster hunter world, by a long way

Spent 4,000 hours on Dota 2. Finally kicked the habit and Valve goes and drops Deadlock 🙄

Warframe, I have more than 3000 hours on it but I haven't touched it in years

Hitman: Codename 47

RTS games for me, particularly WarZone-2100 & Earth-2150.

The fact that you get a base of operations to return to & has Picture-in-picture mode is a unique thing

Lots, chrono trigger, ffvi-x, Mario 64, basically every yakuza game, sekiro, breath of the wild, a ton more. Embarassing ones sometimes like that power washing game because I got it for free and was like “this will be dumb” then kept going and going and going

Some older games that I’d probably power through now but at the time cheating/save states/youtube wasn’t easily accessible (gamefaqs existed but text based walkthroughs hit much different). Like the ps1 survival horror games: resident evil 1-3, silent hill, Dino crisis, parasite eve, etc. when you know what to do most of those can be run through in a few hours but in 1997 on the original hardware (no save states) and at best a txt file faq to guide you if you get stuck it would take some time to figure it out. Then with ones like re2 that had multiple routes and endings you’d play it like 6-7 times at least

Skyrim, Demon's Souls

Minecraft and Factorio.

Both mixed in a little IRL depression and I was living vicariously through Steve or making factories.

Mail order monsters

The Bards Tale (OG)

FF Tactics

Bushido Blade

Vagrant Story

And Terraria most recently.

Another answer for me is Super Smash Bros. Melee (but could probably apply to many multiplayer games).

Normally I'd always engaged with it in person, at events. But when I started playing online, it was almost too much of a good thing.

On the Internet, your next match is always 15 seconds away. You get beat, you go 'I can do better, just give me another chance'. You win, you're on a high, you don't ever want to stop.

The game has that perfect push and pull (at least when you're playing someone anywhere near your level) that just builds compulsion. You're constantly engaged in decision making or quick button pressing each moment, and it just feels satisfying.

Space Engineers right now. The Scrapyard scenario really gets me.

Anno 1404, Hades, the recent Hitman series, and now also Satisfactory. Help.

Civ, Balatro.

Asheron's Call hit me at just the right age. That was my mmo. I remember people going on about WoW like it was the most incredible thing, but it always felt like a hollow world to me.

I tried many other mmos over the years but none of them ever hit like the first one.

I think I was really just chasing that sense of wonder I felt at my first one, which is increasingly hard to capture as you move forward through life.

Duke Nukem 3D.
Then Quake I and II.
I'm still playing the latter many times a week.

Sad to say league

Less sad to say hades. Incredible game that I have preemptively already told my partner she won't see me for a week after hades 2 comes out

Unfortunately Fortnite. The Jak series. I guess that's it. I'll edit if I think of more.

Elite. Lode Runner. Castles of Dr. Creep. Boulderdash.

I've been playing and DMing D&D sessions on Neverwinter Nights for two decades.

The only other game that got me for an extended period of time was Dead by Daylight. (Around 1500 hours)

All FromSoftware games including most recently AC6. Also Stardew. I've beaten Stardew probably more than any other game and there's a ton of mods that expand the experience.

Terraria was like absolute heroin for me.

DDRaceNetwork, bcs of the fun ppl i meet all the time. About 1800 hrs.

Balatro

Crash bandicoot 3 was my first heperfocus game. I played that game until I finished all levels, first time I did that my entire life. Second one was Skyrim. I played it so much!! I clocked over a thousand hours on the vanilla game, and I played more modded than vanilla, I can't tell how much I played in total because steam didn't track my modded playthrough. Then there was super Mario Galaxy (I got every star except the stupid thrash bombing one and I'm still so fucking mad about it). My most recent ones are monster hunter world (plus DLC) and current is monster hunter wilds, I've already 100% it and am in the process of crafting every single armour and weapons

Barotrauma, I checked it out on a free to play weekend a few months back and have been hooked since

Lots of tinkering and the modding community is extensive, best played with friends but the single player is good too

I have never left the Terraria addiction. Mods have made that significantly worse haha.

Many in the past, but the most recent is Project Zomboid. That game would quickly take away decades of my life if I let it.

Most of them? I have played hundreds of hours of Dysmantle, and before that I played hundreds of hours of Minecraft and before that Raft and before that terraria and before that vulcanoids, and before that ...

Darktide, once I finally got a good grasp of all the major mechanics, which it has a lot of.

Which is awesome because I got the game 2.5 years after its release, when it was finally in a playable and fun state where they finally implemented most of the features they promised and should have been in the game from the beginning, and because of the age I got it for only $20, probably one of my most successful Patient Gamer™ moves so far lol

Approaching 800 hours recently, and it looks like I'm still gonna be spending a LOT more time in it since the most recent major update introduced some noticable change to difficulty (mostly in ways I've always wanted) and I'm getting my rear end handed back to me repeatedly once again in the highest difficulty, like the good old days XD

Neverwinter Nights and Planeshift are the two that come to mind

Gemcraft, I always have to make it to the end... even if it takes forever

Warframe. I have been clean for years now, but the itch never really goes away

RuneScape: I can’t believe I played the game after the removal of free trade. It was such a poorly run game, and I’m can’t believe anyone still plays it anymore. It’s unbelievable how arrogant mod MacDonalds was, and that I only quit in 2011 after I got scammed trying to sell the account.

League of Legends: this is another case of really great game, but incredibly poorly managed. Having Phreak be the balance lead just feels like shit, and made me feel like shit because I kept playing thinking it’d get better. This is a very global, very competitive game that was balanced around competitive play and optimizing spectator happiness. You can guess just how fun it was to play a character that was deemed “unfun to watch in worlds” and get absolutely gutted by Phreak’s team. The opposite was also hilariously true… they buffed certain characters so they’d sell more skins or because spectators like watching them. I finally quit after having to swap my main because they nerfed or reworked it and left me playing something else several times.

Football Manager. A damn spreadsheet game 😭

Haha, yeah I have my eyes on Balatro, but have refrained from getting it, because of that.

My latest addiction was Peripeteia but I beat it in about 40 hours so the high was short lived. I really fuckin loved that game and looking forward to additions as it moves through early access.

Star wars galaxies, RuneScape, Minecraft, destiny 2, red dead redemption, dark souls 3, elden ring, bloodborne, and currently dayz

Old School RuneScape. I don't know what it is, but it's like crack. I cannot stop playing it.

Everquest Online Adventures and then City of Heroes.

For EQOA I had 3 CRT tvs and five PS2s with an account for each one going for a couple of years straight. I worked on the road at the time. I was in a different hotel every two months and lugged that around with me. I was in a guild, led raids, powerleveled my and other people's alts.

City of Heroes was similar. Three accounts, I met my ex wife there, was a prominent member in one of the largest Super Groups in the game. I was there from the first couple months of the game until it shut down.

When I found out about the CoH private servers I went back and caught myself slipping right back to the old ways so I haven't touched a multi-player game since.

First it was Call of Duty in the mid 2000's. Then it was WoW. It all culminated in EVE Online. Untold hours spent in those games.

I have zero game addictions now. It just doesn't hit like it used to.

I'm more into stuff like Dwarf Fortress, Cogmind, and Caves of Qud now.

I saw a lot of factory games in other comments but I didn't see my drug of choice : Captain of Industry. The process chains are really complex and you can't just throw space at a problem. I played for 24 hours straight once without getting up from my chair.

1200h in PZ and 1000h in Rimworld. This was across many years, but still, I have a job and a family, so I feel like that's a huge chunk of time.

First was RuneScape, that lasted a month or so. Next was Civ V, that was a couple weeks. I learned my lesson.

last one was dave the diver. Loved it

There's many, even from your list. Recently Deadzone: Rogue.

Mindustry

Civ, and Rimworld. "One more turn" crack in a bottle.

Old School Runescape. I have multiple characters, but started from scratch a month ago, already have 250 hours of play time on it.

I spent a full year of my life playing Grim Dawn.

Slay the Spire

There are a bunch of games that I'll get super into, play for a while, then be finished with.

Slay the Spire taps perfectly into every compulsive center of my brain to make me keep playing. Like, we talk about 'addictive' games usually just as ones you like a lot... this is the first time I started to see it closer to actual addictive (though not actually a serious thing for me). It's such a sweetspot for my habits, I feel like I'd just keep saying 'one more run' so consistently, hours, days would evaporate. It kept me busy, to the detriment of doing other things.

You get on a good run, better keep going. You lose a run, might as well just start a new one and see if you have good opening luck. There's rarely a point that feels like "I should stop", until some IRL obligation comes up.

I still go back to it often when I just want an enjoyable way to kill time, or do something while I watch videos/tv on the side.

Other games with roguelike elements tap into this feeling too, like Balatro, Vampire Surviors, or Hades. But STS is where it felt strongest to me.

I have 3000 hours in satisfactory and I refuse to believe it is an addiction

I bet I have thousands (thinking 5000+) hours on the original counterstrike. Steam says I have like 12.6 hours. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How can people play single games for thousands of hours ?

I game a lot and my absolute record is maybe ~400h

Rhythm Doctor

The Cluefinder series, Minecraft beta from 1.4 to 1.6, BOTS, Secret of the Solstice, Realm of the Mad God, Skyrim, Mindustry, FTL, and currently CS2 and PokeRogue. Though I'm sure I'm forgetting at least one.

14 years I've been wandering about.

Rust. Its a horribly addicting game thats ruined many lives. Also, Frostpunk.

I have around twentythousand hours in the counterstrike franchise. I played source semi competively, and was moderator on massive 64player severs. nowadays i play occasionally because CS2 just doesn't do it for me anymore.

Faster Than Light

The Witcher two and three

Morrowind and Skyrim

Back in the day i played Battlefield 1942 Desert Combat where I was a top10 player. Also a ton of Unreal tournament.

Heartstone also comes to mind.

Cant forget minecraft

oh Guild Wars...damn put some hours in as well.

Right now I quite enjoy Mechabellum, and im starting to get too sucked in again.

deltarune, tf2, and uh.. hsr or pgr.

Depending on what kind of addiction behavior you might look at, it's been different games.

For the 'I think about it all the time, and wait for my next chance to get back to it,' an old Minecraft modpack called Per Fabrica Ad Astra was the best. It was the full knapping flint tools through visiting other planets stack, with a good progression tree, so I was thinking about designs for an oil refinery when I should have been sleeping, trying to complete 'just this one last thing' when I should have been going other places, and forgetting to eat because I was making an in-game kitchen.

If you're talking more the 'The world has me beat, so I'm reaching for my...' style, a favorite depressant, Hardspace: Shipbreaker is that. I beat it long ago but I still go back and just do a shift or several when even gaming is 'just too much.'

And if it's more the style of a stimulant, BPM: Bullets Per Minute. It's a great way to hit a high speed flow state. Boom boom chik, boom boom chik

I'd say the first one that really got me was Roller Coaster Tycoon when I was a kid. It got to a point where I was playing so much that my dreams were all in isometric grid form. Mostly about park designs, but even other dreams were set in that reality.

After that, it was WoW for my first 3 semesters of college. I didn't go to class most of the time and got academic suspension for a year. After that I was very cautious with MMOrpgs. Never got too invested into a guild again.

Gemstone 3 mud back in the late 90’s. Had its claws in me for a few years.

Operation Harsh Doorstop multiplayer - I can't get enough of Project Reality style semirealistic battlefield games.

Motortown: Behind The Wheel - the driving just feels so damn good...

Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead - specifically Sky Islands mod to give the game a more "run based" focused feel. This game has passed an event horizon of environmental richness no other adventure game comes close to, the landscape truly feels alive and it is very addictive in a good way.

Call Of Duty Mobile & Other Battle Royale Mobile Games - such as (now defunct) Apex Legends Mobile or Farlight 84, never spent money on it in addictive way I just find higher level competitive battle royale gameplay fascinating.

RS, i bought prenium for 6 months then i started playing it all the time(right before the pandemic) then bought ingame bonds with ingame money for a couple years, until early last year i stopped doing prenium for members, only play maitenance mode on the account.

As others have said slay the spire took over a few days off my life as did dicey dungeons, and Stardew valley.

I played destiny 2 for six years straight.

I finally stopped playing early this year due to burn out.

Now I'm playing Diablo 4 which is a dead game btw.

None of them.