The Video Game Critic

I thought about this while playing Batman: Arkham Origins last night. I ended up playing for three hours because I found myself inside the Gotham City Police Department and I didn't want to stop until I made my way out of the building, and the last hour of this play session had my wishing internally that the damn mission would just end already.

I've personally found that somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours is ideal for me. It takes somewhere between 15 to 30 minutes for me to become fully immersed and enter the 'flow' state where I'm so engaged that I'm barely aware of my surroundings. I can stretch the state an extra half-hour or so if I'm having a lot of fun, but anything beyond that quickly becomes a case of diminishing returns. On a couple of different occasions I have played for far longer than that because the game was a rental that had to be returned (the most extreme example being God of War III, which I played for 10-11 hours on a Saturday so that I could return it the next day) and I felt increasing miserable after the first few hours; this is one of the reasons why I just buy games now rather than renting them. Some of it is just boredom or a feeling of being overwhelmed, but I do get some physical symptoms, with a feeling of pressure in my forehead is the most dramatic. However, I have found that if I take a few hours off I can return and enjoy myself again; I did this several times when trying to finish Silent Hill 2 right before going on vacation.

What is the perfect amount of time for you to play in a sitting?

I prefer gaming when I know I have 4-6 hours to spare. I may take a 10-15 minute break every hour.

Usually I play late at night, But it all
depends on the game.
There are some I play in small intervals,
and there are others I can completely
lose track of time because im so into the
game and the story!

Ozzy

I have to take breaks from gaming every hour to hour and a half. I get really burned out when I game for 2+ hours. The longest play session I've had was with MGS2 where my dad and I played for about 10-11 hours and completed the entire game in one sitting. That was definitely not the norm but we rented the game and both got into the story (although it was very weird).

It depends on the game and console for me. When I played Skyrim, I could play for 3-4 hours. When I play Call of Duty: Ghosts (the Alien Extinction) on XBox One, after about 1.5 to 2 hours and my eyeballs begin to fry. If I go old school and play INTV or SNES, usually an hour is about enough.

I'd say 2 hours, any more and my concentration level wanes, plus I feel I should be doing something more productive if I game above that. I do like to have a gaming day occasionally though.

Depends on what time of day i'm playing, if it's in the afternoon, I generally play for around 4-5 hours(sometimes more depending on how engrossing the experience is, I believe the longest i've played a game in one sitting before getting tired is 9 hours), if it's late at night, then I generally play for about 3 hours.

I think I played 6-8 hours of Borderlands 2 yesterday. It's such an MMO style game, I finally had to say enough, I'm not doing another mission right now.

[QUOTE=Sut]I'd say 2 hours, any more and my concentration level wanes, plus I feel I should be doing something more productive if I game above that. [/QUOTE]

This is part of it, as these are certainly feelings I didn't have as a kid. If I was 9 and felt like spending my entire Saturday playing River City Ransom, the only thing that would stop me would be my parents or a power outage; now if I play for anything longer than two hours I start to wonder if playing a mediocre Batman game is worth my time or not.

1/2 hour to an hour.