In my experience, simply being "not boring" is not enough. Usually for me it needs to have at least three qualities of the following four: pressure, interest, competition, and novelty. If a game is interesting but lacks competition or novelty, I may start playing it, but it's unlikely I'll continue for more than 15 minutes.

Same. Novelty (or something "innovative") and competition are huge drivers for me to focus on something.

That sounds somewhat like depression/anxiety paired along with ADHD. In adult ADHD they can often be very intertwined because by the time you've reached adulthood you have a history of impulsive decisions or bad time management to regret. Or perhaps it's just a symptom of ADHD combined with aging. I don't know about you but "hyperfocus" seemed to come much easier when I was younger which I associate with being less aware of my shortcomings.

I am not depressed and experience the exact same weekend malaise of the person you’re responding to described.

I found an exceptional game last weekend that I played through. I laughed, I cried, it was fantastic. I spent a lot of my free time on it, and beat it.

This weekend I was just a little disappointed I couldn’t wipe my brain and play that game again.

I don’t think that’s depression, it’s just being unwilling to put up with a game or activity being boring.

Do you like digital card games at all? Try Inscryption, it's fantastic (as far as I've gotten anyway, it's also quite difficult). I like it better than Slay the Spire personally, which it definitely took inspiration from, and ran with it.

It's also a game you probably should go into not knowing hardly anything about it ahead of time. I've already accidentally spoiled myself on a few things looking for help getting past a couple parts that I wish I didn't know about ahead of time.

What's the game you played that you wish you could wipe your memory of and play it again?

The game I just recently played is Roadwarden, which plays like a very prosaic RPG, and after playing I realized is using the RenPy virtual novel engine to fantastic effect. All said and done I played about 20 hours for $9, felt like buying a good fantasy novel/ choose your own adventure, or one of those old Gamebook RPGs from the 80s.

It’s also fun because the source code is all in Python and just sitting there in the folders, which has made me interested in making something similar. Now to just write an interesting branching story…

Since I enjoyed it so much I’ve been branching out and trying games I wouldn’t have considered before, and just downloaded Vampire Coteries of New York.

Roadwarden looks very cool and wasn't on my radar at all, thanks for sharing it. Also I'm surprised that was made with RenPy, looks like it really took it above and beyond what that engine was built for originally.

Yeah for sure, I wouldn't ever say anything is truly universal. Just a trend I've noticed with my own ability to focus on even things I do enjoy and in my own experience it can be difficult to untangle things when you have a comorbidity of depression, ADHD and anxiety which is pretty common in adults.

Has this helped long term and repeatedly? I have that same struggle of switching between things all my life even if I enjoy one activity a lot. Very occasionally I do find something I can sit and enjoy for hours but it is rare.

Yes willpower is too simple and too tied up with connotations of hardworkingness and virtue to adequately explain it. It's more like "don't have control over where attention is focused." Wanting to do it may make it more likely but there are other factors, and I can also easily get caught up in a task that is actively unpleasant. Unmedicated the focus goes where it wants to go, not where I want it to go; but not necessarily nowhere either.

And ADHD people in my experience aren't worse at activities that do require what I would call simple willpower. Things like race cycling or endurance running, where persisting through discomfort and even pain are necessary.