DEVING VS. GAMING

I will say the reason I stopped deving is because I started gaming. In the past I had maybe a handful of games to play and they were fun but didn't scratch certain itches so I turned to deving in the hope of possibly scratching those itches. But these days there are so many games so easily accessible that I scratch all over without it even itching.

Maybe I went to far with the metaphor.

Basically I failed the balance.

Many professional game devs don't play games for fun for similar concerns you gave, like lack of free time, games that don't contribute to to new game design knowledge, etc.. After a long time spent at a computer, most devs maintain a healthy lifestyle by pursuing interests outside of gaming. Too much time spent in video games (be it development, playing for fun, or playing for analysis) at once time skews your life too far in one direction, and cripples your experiences you can draw from as a designer.

Obviously, few of us here work on games professionally, but I think the principle is the same. While gaming for fun is perfectly fine, I think it's important to look at hobbies OUTSIDE of gaming.

To try and sum it up with statistics, I try to spend 50% of my free time developing, 25% of my time gaming, and the remaining 25% pursuing other interests.

For me it helps that lately games that aren't RPGs or some sort of simulator seem to just make me really agitated, so mostly I play things that I can learn from/be inspired by.

I enjoy playing games but don't have much time to as I used to. If you want to learn a new concept from a game sometimes just seeing it in a video is enough to understand the premise of the gaming concept and so playing new games rarely adds to ideas for me at least these days. In fact sometimes its better to look to the outside world for game play ideas.

The idea of a game dev who doesn't play at least some games in their free time is really strange to me. It'd be like an author who never reads or a composer who never listens to music. Like everyone else has said, you have to allow yourself time to dev, play, and enjoy other unrelated activities.

There's another important thing to point out here, though. Even when you play games in your free time, I don't think it always needs to be to learn something about game design. That's fine, of course, and you're likely to learn from other games even when you're not trying to, but I don't think you should always play games with that specific goal in mind.

In my experience, the quickest way to kill my enjoyment of something is to turn it into an assignment. And when I play games thinking primarily about what I'll learn from it, that's what it becomes. It becomes something I have to get through rather than something I want to stop and enjoy. I don't want to play games just because I'll learn something about game design. I want to play games because it's an intrinsically fun thing to do, for its own sake. You have to give yourself some time to do things purely because you want to do them, and not for any other reason.

Sometimes when I'm into a someone's game especially when too long, I feel bad because discussing the character build/mod/design of the game itself, is like a lowkey game developing but instead I have no power to change that. Then I want to switch to create a game and discuss my game and my friends, and how to improve it.

Then again, sometimes when I'm developing my game and 'suffered' on it. I wish I'm playing an already completed game, so I went to play a game. It balanced out in the end.