What is it that motivates you to play a game? There’s the catch-all term, ‘fun’, which I love and loathe in equal measure.

I love it because it binds all of us who indulge in interactive entertainment together: One Nation Under A Game. But I loathe it for much the same reason; the word ‘fun’ is so overly broad that it often fails to capture the specific experience that I’m looking for, the precise itch I want scratched. Am I looking to kill time? Challenge myself? Compete against someone else? Pretend to be something I’m not? Lose myself in another world? All of the above?

The simple answer, of course, is that it depends. The more complicated answer is that, as of late, I’ve found it difficult to motivate myself to complete story-based games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Increasingly, I don’t want to remember what I was doing when I last played. I don’t want to recall which button does what. I don’t want to remember how much I have previously accomplished. I don’t want to return to a particular emotional state that corresponds to where I left off in the narrative or mission structure. Once I do all of those things, I’m good to go. But given my increasingly busy life, the time and effort that it takes to properly resume my place in the game-story feels too much like, well, work.

Now, I’m not expecting you to sympathise with me here. After all, I’m one of those people who are lucky enough to play games for a living. But I’m fortunate in that my editors at Newsweek don’t tell me which games I have to play or how long I should play them for; instead, they pretty much leave me to my own devices. Which, for the second year running, means that I more often than not choose to play games that I can get in and out of quickly, yet are still capable of holding my interest should I decide to go on a binge: Rez, Lumines, Every Extend Extra, Super Stardust HD, Everyday Shooter, Geometry Wars Galaxies, Rock Band, Space Invaders Extreme, Bejeweled.

Each of these titles scratches the itch, and they all do it exceedingly well. But it’s more than that. Every session that I have with one of these games feels like a complete experience – even when it’s interrupted – as though I’ve experienced a beginning, a middle and an end. With a story-based game, beginnings are easy, middles are often attenuated and misshapen while the endings, assuming I even get there, are frequently awkward, truncated or anticlimactic. This isn’t always the case – there are always exceptions – but it’s certainly reasonable to say that even many of the best developers struggle with the pacing and structure of narrative-driven titles. Telling a story well over the course of ten or 20 hours isn’t an easy task, as even a terrific game like BioShock bears out.

I know these things to be true about videogames, so I can of course overlook them if I choose. The problem is that when I take a broader look at my current entertainment habits, my recently developed aversion to narrative is also manifesting itself when faced with other media. I’d rather watch sports than a dramatic television series now that HBO’s holy trinity (The Sopranos, The Wire and Deadwood) is off the air. I find I don’t watch as many feature films these days, whereas before I thought nothing of going to see three movies or more over the course of a single weekend. Just what’s going on here?

In my opinion, the older I get, the less willing I am to waste my time on an entertainment experience that isn’t of uniformly high quality; in fact, I’d prefer not to even take the risk of making the commitment. Every televised basketball game isn’t uniformly good, but there’s certainly enough ritual and custom there, from the announcers’ banter to the game’s ebb and flow, that it, well… scratches that itch. It’s comforting.

That’s what I get when I pick up Rez or Super Stardust HD or Rock Band for the umpteenth time – or, rather, I know what I’m going to get when I pick these games up for the umpteenth time. That’s not to say, however, that I’m no longer receptive to new gaming experiences. It’s just that I prefer them to be shorter games; titles like Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, PixelJunk Eden, Castle Crashers and The Last Guy, which I can quickly sample, then determine whether they will make it into my rotation or get dropped for all eternity.

And that’s how I feel at the moment. I may feel differently in a week, a month or a year’s time. But for the time being, when I think of fun, it’s in the shorter games that I’m discovering the greatest and most reliable pleasure.