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My VN slump


Clephas

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Due to work in recent weeks, I wasn't able to play any VNs for about a week straight... and when I tried to pick up Ouka Sabaki to finish Feb's releases, I found I had no urge whatsoever to play a VN... any VN. 

Understand, I've been playing VNs constantly since 2009.  I literally have not gone more than a day without playing at least a little bit of a VN (even if it was only a half hour or so) since then.  So, to my shock, I've found I don't have the energy to pick one up for the first time in almost eight years. 

I'm an addict, it's true... but apparently, somewhere in the last few months, something broke me out of my fixation and I found myself uninterested in playing VNs outside of my personal obsessions.  I still plowed my way through despite that in January and February, but I felt like a kid going back to his homework after a few hours playing video games when I tried to play another after that delay. 

This might seriously be the effective end of VN of the Month, if I can't recapture my desire to continue...

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I know the feeling, but imo, no slump lasts forever. Its honestly more surprising that you HAVEN'T had a slump up until now, so isn't it more likely that you are just in shock over the fact that its even possible for you to not want to play VNs? lol.

When something is such a huge part of your life there will always be something about it that calls you back to it in the end unless you literally grow out of it. But growing out of it is a completely different thing than burnout, and requires an actual change of who you are. Suddenly finding you don't have a desire to do it anymore with no real explanation is almost certainly just burnout. (Speaking as someone who goes hardcore on literally everything I do and am as intimately familiar with burnout as its possible for a human to be :P)

Edited by Valduran
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I have had my slumps as well, and i tend to just accept them.
For me they last anywhere from a couple of months to a year.
And then i get bored of what i took up to replace it and go back to what i was doing before.
When i got my first vn slump i started reading manga and when i got bored of that i got back to vn's.

Personally my biggest issue is that i like to go back and reread stuff which means i either dont have time to read something new or dont have time to reread something.
I really wish there were more hours in a day.

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Just take a rest maybe if I may said, because apparently you suffering some burnout which is quite normal. Although to continuing your 'VN of the Month' or not it's entirely your choice though.

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It's not a slump. You're simply changing like we all do. Despite my wilingness to learn japanese and general fondness for vn's, I found myself incapable to play them on a regular basis and I can't really force myself to do so either. I'm kind of still slowly plowing through my backlog (currently on 魔物娘の館 彗星館異形録 ~人魚の章~ :makina:), but it's not really enjoyable when you force yourself to do things, that used to bring joy in the past. Just... I don't know - it's not like my interest in vn's vained or anything, I'd say the opposite, but I simply don't feel like playing all the games I wanted to. Maybe it's because I'm more focused on creating something of my own nowadays. Maybe because I have a decent job that finally allowed me to afford things I could only dream of a couple years ago; that aside, there's life and various obligations to consider as well. Sadly, reading and playing vn's remains time consuming. I'm not the kind of person to waste a couple days worth of time on a silly moege, I might not even enjoy that much.

At times... we just need a longer break.

Edited by Narcosis
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On 3/19/2017 at 2:33 PM, Narcosis said:

It's not a slump. You're simply changing like we all do. Despite my wilingness to learn japanese and general fondness for vn's, I found myself incapable to play them on a regular basis and I can't really force myself to do so either. I'm kind of still slowly plowing through my backlog (currently on 魔物娘の館 彗星館異形録 ~人魚の章~ :makina:), but it's not really enjoyable when you force yourself to do things, that used to bring joy in the past. Just... I don't know - it's not like my interest in vn's vained or anything, I'd say the opposite, but I simply don't feel like playing all the games I wanted to. Maybe it's because I'm more focused on creating something of my own nowadays. Maybe because I have a decent job that finally allowed me to afford things I could only dream of a couple years ago; that aside, there's life and various obligations to consider as well. Sadly, reading and playing vn's remains time consuming. I'm not the kind of person to waste a couple days worth of time on a silly moege, I might not even enjoy that much.

At times... we just need a longer break.

No, it isn't a change.  I apparently still enjoy VNs (I tested it with a few older ones I still have installed).  I seem to have just burned out on the VN of the Month thing... I've been playing four to six VNs every month for since September 2013 from the month's releases, and as a result... I've grown extremely tired of driving myself to keep up.  Considering that at least two out of every month's releases are pretty much guaranteed to be kusoge, it is actually surprising that I didn't fry long ago.

Edit:  Think about it this way... left to my own devices, I probably wouldn't play about one out of three of those VNs in the first place.  I'd check them out in advance and decide based on the concept and possibly the writer whether I was interested, then play them or not based on that.  With VN of the Month, I usually at least attempt to play everything of interest from a given month, though there are some companies and series I refuse to touch.  While that has resulted in a surprisingly large number of gems falling into my lap, that doesn't make up for all the shit I have to wade through on a monthly basis to find those gems anymore.

Edited by Clephas
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Just now, Clephas said:

No, it isn't a change.  I apparently still enjoy VNs (I tested it with a few older ones I still have installed).  I seem to have just burned out on the VN of the Month thing... I've been playing four to six VNs every month for since September 2013 from the month's releases, and as a result... I've grown extremely tired of driving myself to keep up.  Considering that at least two out of every month's releases are pretty much guaranteed to be kusoge, it is actually surprising that I didn't fry long ago.

It's quite amazing you're able to burn through so many titles a single month. I can't really imagine myself to read so many titles in such a short timeframe. Considering most of those games aren't really the types you'd enjoy normally, this makes the whole task feel more like reviewing games, rather than reading them out of your own personal enjoyment. I'd consider dropping the VN of the month in that case, continuing it might even cause further unwiligness to discover new games and that can develop into a serious burnout with time. Give yourself some time, read the stuff you'd truly enjoy and provide less, but with more quality. I'm sure most of us come here to read your musings on the very best and most unique of vn's.

 

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45 minutes ago, Narcosis said:

It's quite amazing you're able to burn through so many titles a single month. I can't really imagine myself to read so many titles in such a short timeframe. Considering most of those games aren't really the types you'd enjoy normally, this makes the whole task feel more like reviewing games, rather than reading them out of your own personal enjoyment. I'd consider dropping the VN of the month in that case, continuing it might even cause further unwiligness to discover new games and that can develop into a serious burnout with time. Give yourself some time, read the stuff you'd truly enjoy and provide less, but with more quality. I'm sure most of us come here to read your musings on the very best and most unique of vn's.

 

One of the problems with that mode of thinking is that VNs are very much like books, in that you can't tell what the content is like by the cover in a lot of cases.  I remember when I played Erect, I'd anticipated 'just' a nukige and was planning to drop it if my supposition was right... but it actually turned out to be something a lot better.  In the same way, I've encountered a number of games that looked generic on the surface but had hidden depths.  Just looking at the covers of most Clochette games, for instance, you would never imagine the quality of the narrative and settings in those games...  That was my main reason for my search. 

This is born of my belief, nurtured when I began expanding my anime horizons about the turn of the century, that genres I am not really suited to can still have stories I can enjoy.  This was confirmed repeatedly in my experiences... but at the cost of experiencing some truly horrid anime and VNs, lol.  I'm a story addict... whether it is a personal story or a grand one, I love a good story.  I read, I read, and I read... I live to read.  

Edit: Also, there is nothing more pointless than telling a junkie he has a bad habit...  he knows but he doesn't care if it destroys him, lol.  I'm the guy who rearranged his entire lifestyle around playing VNs, after all.

Edited by Clephas
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Yeah lol. There's generally no curing a story junkie. I am one too, and its the most unchanging aspect of my personality.

With VNs unfortunately there's just so much rehashed junk that its definitely easy to see how burnout can happen. Hence my honest amazement that this is your first time experiencing burnout in 7 years.

I don't think its really a problem if you don't continue the VN of the Month tradition though. I just come here to see someone talking about relevant and new VNs rather than only the rare (and generally old) titles that have made it into English. Just speaking for myself I wouldn't sweat it too much if you started skipping titles which seemed highly unlikely to be interesting to you.

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I was wondering when the great Cleffy would burn out. I burned out in < 2 years of 1 VN every couple months, jezuz idk how you managed thousands within a decade.

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Being an English only reader and all, I never ever get burnout from reading because of the release schedule. I do get burned out from reading certain VNs though.

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