Games

I don't think this is super uncommon but in harder difficulties of Terraria, I just play the game as a fishing game. I pretty much exclusively fish for the first few hours of the game and gear up solely through fishing. Then I repeat for the 2nd half of the game as well. I'm also setting up huts in every biome location to do fishing quests.

The Ship. It's normally supposed to be a social deduction game, but some friends and I all get together in a private server and basically just play deathmatch. It's hilarious because most of fhe weapons are really hard to kill with and you still have to be sneaky because if you get caught, you go to jail (which is also full of shanks). It always leads to some great chaos, especially with more people.

I used to only do something called "surfing" in the Counter-Strike: Source days.

There are dedicated servers that only run surf maps.

The original crackdown, the only movable object that was completely indestructible were the big yellow skips (don't know what Americans call them).

Would play in coop with one character fixed in a spot to stop them despawning and see how many I could gather from around the map and bring back. You could only carry them in your arms preventing you from driving and climbing the taller buildings, forcing you into unconventional routes through the city, often while being shot. Think I got about 20 as my record before having to sign off.

Factorio is fun for me until oil comes up.

I have managed to play further with the black market mod. I can make whatever item I want, sell enough of it and buy the things I want or need instead of making them myself.

Other mods add more powerful machines that make items much faster. I like to do manually stuff with one machine only, then swap to something else with the same machine and repeat the process.

Turned off the aggro on the patrolling demons in Murdered: Soul Suspect, because an otherwise peaceful detective adventure - where you play as a ghost investigating your own murder - really didn't need the random stressful action sequences 🤷‍♂️ (Sadly you can't turn off the floor traps, but at least those are stationary.)

Horizon zero dawn and forbidden west. I just roam around and by accident find the missions I’m supposed to do. I also exploit all the enemies, there is a hard lock on where they can walk, so I just stand 10 meter out of the zone and start hitting big enemies for 5 minutes without taking damage.

I will blame Skyrim for this behaviour

I was part of some exploration guilds in World of Warcraft with the aim to explore every inch of the Azeroth, get beyond every instance border and just climb hard terrain even if there was an easier way up.

Minecraft. You think that there's no way to play Minecraft "wrong", right up until you accidentally fall into the 4-block wide valley that I've cut through the entire map or walk into the liminal space that I've mined out just above bedrock. Fuck cutesy cottages and Minecraft in minecraft- let's just build superstructures that disappear beyond the draw distance of the map. Fuck creative mode- let's do it while we're facing down mobs day and night. Fuck explosives- do that shit with a pick like a goddamn man. You haven't really seen confused rage until your child discovers hundreds of unexplained and unexplainable brutalist towers extending into the distance like the gravestones of alien gods when they thought you were building a farm over the next hill.

I like playing games that incentivise stealth as Michael Bay films. Give me rocket launchers and c4. Yeah I don't have the high score for the level but I will kill literally every single non-vital NPC.

I collect all the stars since GTA III.

I also play everything on Easy because I have a life.

Assassin's Creed. The actual gameplay is almost never as interesting as just walking around a meticulous recreation of ancient civilizations as a digital tourist.

This is a very mild violation, but I like to play these puzzles: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
...except that I create a custom difficulty level which is quite a step below the easiest difficulty and then I almost rather speedrun the puzzles.

The Rectangles puzzle at 5x5 size has been my crack for the past months and I'm at about 13 seconds now (using my phone as input).

I mean, it's very casual speedrunning. No one cares about my time, so I actually never timed myself before just now. But yeah, I just like the different challenge of thinking fast rather than complex.

Who amongst us hasn't played GTA at least once while trying to drive around and follow all the traffic laws for absolutely no reason at all

I often use cheats to remove grindy and boring bits beyond a certain point. Usually the difficulty curve is pretty bad and a game is only hard or challenging in the beginning. So I play as intended until I reach a point at which it's just a matter of time and not skill. So I just give myself a ton of crafting mats or currency or whatever so I can focus on the fun and interesting parts of the game.

The only way to play NASCAR games is to drive backwards and see how many cars you can involve in a wreck.

I actually don't know the way you're supposed to beat Super Metroid "correctly." I've always done what I ended up learning was a major sequence break resulting from a bunch of bomb jumps to get the power bomb early, and use that to get some other stuff that allows me to beat the game out of order.

I also never start Metroid Prime without immediately getting the double jump. I used to be up there on speed running that game. I don't play the player's choice or switch versions whenever I decide to crack it out. The original was literal perfection.

Like playing Gwent instead of fighting monsters as the witcher?

I'm starting a run of Project Zomboid without zombies

For some time I used Minecraft as a mindnumbing tool. I dug a huge underground structure with stone pickaxes. I had some chests of wood down there to make new pickaxes, chests, and torches, and dug an underground space of several square kilometers, 30ish layers high.

I used to just cruise around in The Crew, enjoying a chill ride around

I play heavily modded Elder Scrolls, where my character never touches the main story.

My favorite Morrowind run was a princess who ended up creating an agricultural baron, buying up every plantation and owning probably hundreds of slaves. She also got into the skooma business on the side (needed money for all of her dresses). Morrowind had a ton of wacky mods that were just fun to play in general - people made Star Wars and LOTR questlines. There’s also the work of Tommy Khajiit (RIP), which is something unique and which has never gotten the respect it deserved. (Or Lady Rae - she liked to recolor the game bright neon colors, and basically got bullied out of the modding community.)

Skyrim is a hunting/vagrant simulator for me. I usually play a Dunmer refugee and avoid the in-game quests entirely. Survival and economy mods to make the focus of the gameplay getting enough gold to afford a room for the night, tweaks to loot to make things more “mundane.”

The Sims for me is either 1800s Utah polygamous Mormons, post apocalyptic Handmaid’s Tale scenarios, or prisons.

For a while, I played the MMO Guild Wars 2 as a music simulator. It has playable in game musical instruments that you can equip, and play with the number keys. A-G are represented with the numbers 1-8 with 9 and 0 swapping an octave lower or higher. Killing monsters? Doing dungeons? Raids and world bosses? Nah I'm just chilling on a beautiful forested cliffside near a waterfall figuring out an arrangement for the Lord of the Rings theme.

Rocket League, apparently.

What a save!

Mindustry It goes from a tower defense game to a logistics game for me Forget enemies, How can I haul the most amount of shit down data pipelines without letting a single container hold items for too long? My worlds are just a absolute mess of conveyor belts going everywhere, transport drones coming and going, items being produced, used, machined and consumed everywhere And the only purpose is to give me more endpoints to grow it

I'm playing Overwatch but actually having fun while doing so /s

Watch Dogs 2. I’ve barely touched the story and just mess around.

Any of The Forest games become basically a zipline simulator once that is unlocked.

As in, clear fell the forest so we can build ziplines everywhere.

I like to play crusader kings II from the point of view of God. Using console commands, sketchy cheat mod, and knowing the right game mechanics you can make characters do all types of crazy stuff. Using the "observe" console command let's you play as a spectator, you can use the "play" command followed by a character ID and you will jump into playing as that character. I like to find a character, give them insane stats, and give them all of the best traits, make them immortal and then spectate for a few hundred years and see what my chosen one made the world into. I also like to try to determine before hand what I want them to do, like becoming emperor of brittania or whatever, and see how close I can get from just 1 or 2 interactions with them.

About half the time I play Cyberpunk 2077 as a first-person RPG. The other half of the time I just play it as a city/driving-simulator.