Non-RPG General News - Why do we spend Time playing Games we don't like?

Rjshae spotted an older interesting article on Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

Why do we spend time playing games we don’t like?

We spend a lot of time playing games we don’t like. Remember The War Z, renamed to Infestation: Survivor Stories after receiving overwhelmingly negative reviews all around? On Steam, it has nearly 14,000 negative reviews which total 507,837 played hours of absolute garbage. Or what about Duke Nukem Forever, which is somehow sitting at ‘Mostly Positive’ at the moment? The 1500-odd Steam reviews that rightly acknowledge it as a flaming trash pile account for 10,013 hours those poor souls will never get back.

I’m fascinated by the lifetimes we cumulatively waste on games we end up hating, and so I decided to dig a little deeper. How long do we typically spend with a game before we decide it’s no good? Do we have to finish it, or do we make up our minds before the credits roll? Does it take us longer to nail down our feelings on a popular game versus an unpopular one? Why on earth don’t we just do something else?

To answer these questions, I took a look at the Steam reviews for a number of big games with ‘mixed’ reception – the kinds of games that defy a simple and immediate classification as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. By averaging out the hour counts of both positive and negative reviews, we can see a consistent trend between the two, with players spending on average two to three times as long with a game they enjoy than a game that leaves them disappointed. Not too surprising, but things get more interesting when we compare the average hour counts with the time it takes to beat these games, as estimated by howlongtobeat.com. Contrasting these values reveals that we often spend enough time with games we don’t recommend to see their credits roll – though whether we actually do reach the end or not is significantly harder to quantify. Judging from sampled review text, though, we push through as far as we can, even when crashes, bugs, and low framerates conspire against us.

[...]