I'm bored by having to go back and forth through forty-eleven screens where nothing happens to get from point A to point B. By really unlikely inventory puzzles--stuff that you'd NEVER do in real life, that has you randomly combining and/or trying inventory until something works. By repetetive, tedious conversations with characters who are supposed to be amusing but are just annoying.

Well, I personally would say, "Gee, here are a lot of dedicated gamers giving useful critique. Most of what I'm hearing is that people are bored by pointless game-extenders and unnecessary repetition. Maybe I can't make a game that will please everyone, but I can work on eliminating that aspect."

WW

Well I have not been gaming long but ......

I don't like annoying and difficult interfaces like the one in ROTS--

I don't like having to wander around and around and around in places I have already been just to see 'if' something I have done somewhere else has triggered something.

Slider puzzles--life long yuk yuk yuk (

The more interaction with the environment, the better

Cut scenes that contain info I need, but don't repeat--phones and doorbells do ring, dogs bark, kids call---

Cut scenes that can't be skipped after I have seen them 1 time-- <img border="0" alt="" title="" src="graemlins/woozy.gif" />

But I love adventuring, so I'll just have to relax and enjoy.

"Louvre: The Final Curse" (aka "The Messenger") also had a map which you could jump on. A bug in that was that you could jump to areas you couldn't walk to.

Much as I enjoyed "Return to Zork" I found myself walking my socks off.

There are a few things that bore me.
1) Meaningingless long conversations with characters, as well as characters who have bizarre mannerisms that draw their speechs out endlessly (Ring).
2) Endless wandering back and forth to find the hotspot that wasn't there beforehand (I am playing Journey to the Center of the Earth right now, so this is high in my mind at present).
3) Long walks where there is no meaningful interaction (Riven, Capri, Rhem). I like the graphics as much as the next person, but when you have been over the territory for the 50th time, it loses its appeal.
4) Lack of engaging story line (Crystal Key 1). If there is no clear goal or a clear mystery as to what the goal is, then what's the point?

My 2 cents (about all I can spare)
Paul

The thing that bores/aggravates me the most is constant disk-swapping. Just finished Nancy Drew Secrets Can Kill, and everytime I went from the house to the school, I had to change disks. Once I got to the school, I didn't want to leave it!!

Boring is walking about with No clue and nothing pretty to look at... In Myst for example, you Knew you had to find coloured pages in each age, so there was a goal. Listening to repeated conversations bores me stupid, and pixel hunts!!

I forgot---Pixel hunts--those are the absolute pits!!!

But I love conversations and backstory, and reading material, etc that deepens the story---anything that pulls me in

WW said:
I love those magical numbers!

I'm not sure what's the fine line between boredom and frustration is. I usually get frustrated in pixel hunting than being bored. 3D games created a 'item in the dark corner phonomina' that makes me pull my hair. Bugs can sometimes be funny sometimes but they can be very~ bad~.

Bored... I guess having scarce gameplay creates boredom. Some lesser 'interactive' (movie, novel, etc) games seem to have scarce gameplay.

Oh, I remeber. The "Hit Enter a Thousand Times" Some games suck up a lot of gameplay time by making the players hit enter or spacebar button constantly. I don't mind long conversations but hours of gameplayplay only pressing enter really bores me. The "None-Entertaining Level Enhancement" in RPGs can be a drag too. "Extreme Screen Scanning" can be boring too. It means clicking everything one the screen in a manner simmilar to old dot-matrix printers. The clicking sound of the mouse almost makes me feel like I'm a dot-matrix printer.

There are a lot of things I find annoying or frustrating in games, but as for boring: long, long journals or notebooks to read, especially when the handwriting is hard to decipher, and then it turns out that most of what you read wasn't necessary for finishing the game.

One exception: the journals in Benoit Sokal games, because they're filled with beautiful illustrations, real works of art.

Riven & Myst(s) have the lightning bolt to zap you past the long walks once you have been thru the area once, that really helps.
A lot us have used the words frustrated, annoying, aggravating, drives me nuts, make me angry, etc.... so being bored is surely not the worst feeling to have, just the best excuse to dump the game.

My worst is sudden death or dead ends(game over), just drives me up the wall.

Conatantly moving back and forth between sites the long long way just to get anything done. Oh how I love games with maps that speeds this along.

Lady K --

welcome to my peculiar world of idiom. another one that may amuse you is "everyone and his hamster..." as in, "I get bored in a game when I have to go back and talk to everyone and his hamster for the forty-eleventh time in the hopes that SOMEONE will FINALLY say something different that will trigger the next puzzle."



WW

WW,
We usually say "everyone and his mother-in-law," but I like yours better!

Having to go back and listen to the same conversation over and over or back to places I've already been 2 or 3 times.
For ex. I just started Outcast and before I finally figured out how to save had to do the beginning 3 times! AAARGH!

Hmmm. These come to mind: Traveling hindrances - not having the lightning bolt to zap me along past terrain I've already been on, or not having a jump map. Switching disks - aaarggghhh! Also, sometimes I come up with plausible, logical solutions that don't work because they're not in keeping with what the gamemaker(s) had in mind. Oh, yes - mazes (what's the purpose there?), and timed Anything. And pretty much all the above (what everyone else said).

I'm pretty outclassed by the gamers here, so I find myself having a difficult time elucidating on all the annoyances from past games. I tend to forget the details, but I do remember that they happen... something that causes me to think twice before buying other potential glitchy games.

But then..... BAAGS!!! And all is forgotten, and I'm once again 'back in the game', bugs and all.

As I read this thread, I really thought that the term boring was not really applicable to many of the postings, nor is it to me. I can't really say that I have been bored by any game that I have played, though I have any number of times been annoyed, even angry at some of the characteristics described in the thread. One of my little irritations, which probably doesn't bother most players, is with games that when you aim in a particular direction, e.g. down a hall (particularly in a maze), it will move you ahead and then turn you to R or L when you arrive. If I head somewhere, that's where I want to go! When I arrive, then let me turn R or L.

oh, I can assure you I have truly been bored. I particularly found _The Omega Stone_ to be stultifying--all those miles over caverns. All that going back and forth and back and forth. *Snore* But anyway, I've experienced lots of moments in games where my main reaction was, "blah blah blah." That might be followed by the iritation of "just get on with it!" but the initial reaction is boredom.

WW

We all sort of wandered off the "Boring" track, didn't we? I guess I'm bored by things that are dumbed-down...and there probably ARE adventure game titles that fall into that category.

As far as *elements* of games, I'd say that mazes are extremely boring. They're not mentally stimulating - don't force me to think or to reason-out problems, and generally make my eyelids grow heavy. Yup. Mazes = "Boring" in my book.

if you've played "shadow of destiny" you have the definition of boring when you want to repeat the game to get a different ending, but can't skip the cutscnenes you've seen like 20 times already, because they're the same ones.

Sound puzzles, where I have to listen really, really closely to the sounds on my cheap, tiny speakers. I hate them. I stopped playing Schizm when I had to figure out the priest in the temple.
I know its a part of the game but I just dont like them.

to GB blackfurie,

Sound puzzles don't faze me, but mazes do!!

I hate mazes too, when you get lost and have to draw a map, i hate drawing maps, what the point of being in an adventure game if you have to draw maps...
I also hate those sequels (or expansion packs)that aren't really sequels but actually just the same as the original, with a few new characters to make it sound new, but then you have to play them coz u loved the original and they're just, well, boring.

I find mazes, mathematical puzzles, long conversations and reading documents boring; but what I hate and really hate, are long cut scenes you can't skip, followed immediately by an action or timed sequence that you know will kill you and you are going to have to restart it so many times.

Hello,I'm in the last chapter and trying to save Joy from hanging.I can't escape the demon goo.Even when I skip,there's no time to escape.I'm not fast enough to escape by hitting the escape buttons and they keep changing each time anyway.Once when I was able to reach Joy,I had seconds left to possess her but she still got hung.Is there a way to get past this somehow,or maybe ther's a different way to save her?Very frustrating indeed!