Are there any games you don't play as it was intended to be played? If so, what game and how?

I don't think this is super uncommon but in harder difficulties of Terraria, I just play the game as a fishing game. I pretty much exclusively fish for the first few hours of the game and gear up solely through fishing. Then I repeat for the 2nd half of the game as well. I'm also setting up huts in every biome location to do fishing quests.

The Ship. It's normally supposed to be a social deduction game, but some friends and I all get together in a private server and basically just play deathmatch. It's hilarious because most of fhe weapons are really hard to kill with and you still have to be sneaky because if you get caught, you go to jail (which is also full of shanks). It always leads to some great chaos, especially with more people.

I used to only do something called "surfing" in the Counter-Strike: Source days.
There are dedicated servers that only run surf maps.
- you might enjoy the game Haste, it has a demo on steam
- TF2 Had surf maps too, and I spent an embarrassing amount of time on those. Got super good at it too.
- There was a game called tribes that combined the surfing/skiing movement with combat before the counterstrike mod levels came out, it was pretty fun the sequel tribes 2 was pretty popular for a minute when it came out too. But the skill ceiling on some of those cs surf maps was wild.

The original crackdown, the only movable object that was completely indestructible were the big yellow skips (don't know what Americans call them).
Would play in coop with one character fixed in a spot to stop them despawning and see how many I could gather from around the map and bring back. You could only carry them in your arms preventing you from driving and climbing the taller buildings, forcing you into unconventional routes through the city, often while being shot. Think I got about 20 as my record before having to sign off.

Factorio is fun for me until oil comes up.
I have managed to play further with the black market mod. I can make whatever item I want, sell enough of it and buy the things I want or need instead of making them myself.
Other mods add more powerful machines that make items much faster. I like to do manually stuff with one machine only, then swap to something else with the same machine and repeat the process.
- Oil is where Factorio becomes factoriohno
- With the update, even if you don't have the DLC, fluids have been rebalanced. You just have to place a pump every 200-250 tiles and everything flows.
  For oil specifically, you don't need anything but petroleum until what used to be late game. So just build a few (like a dozen) refineries and make sure that there's actually oil coming in.
  Once you actually need lubricant, and light oil, set up chemical plants to turn heavy oil into lube and light oil, and light oil into petroleum. It won't be fast, but it won't clog and it will produce what you need, slowly. You can use storage tanks as a buffer for your lube, light oil, and petroleum. Heavy oil isn't used as a direct input for any assembler recipe.
  I consider myself a Factorio apprentice, as I have yet to actually set up a proper train system. I'm slowly learning circuit logic, but can get to Gelba without getting stuck.
  Don't stress optimization, brute force works as well.
  According to my father, who is an absolute Epic Wizard level computer programmer consultant, Factorio teaches you the basics of computer programming.

Horizon zero dawn and forbidden west. I just roam around and by accident find the missions I’m supposed to do. I also exploit all the enemies, there is a hard lock on where they can walk, so I just stand 10 meter out of the zone and start hitting big enemies for 5 minutes without taking damage.
I will blame Skyrim for this behaviour

Turned off the aggro on the patrolling demons in Murdered: Soul Suspect, because an otherwise peaceful detective adventure - where you play as a ghost investigating your own murder - really didn't need the random stressful action sequences 🤷‍♂️ (Sadly you can't turn off the floor traps, but at least those are stationary.)
- Premise of that game is making me ask: have you played Ghost Trick before?
  
  The only flaw with that game is that there is no sequel :(
  
  no, but it's oh my wishlist :)

I was part of some exploration guilds in World of Warcraft with the aim to explore every inch of the Azeroth, get beyond every instance border and just climb hard terrain even if there was an easier way up.

Minecraft. You think that there's no way to play Minecraft "wrong", right up until you accidentally fall into the 4-block wide valley that I've cut through the entire map or walk into the liminal space that I've mined out just above bedrock. Fuck cutesy cottages and Minecraft in minecraft- let's just build superstructures that disappear beyond the draw distance of the map. Fuck creative mode- let's do it while we're facing down mobs day and night. Fuck explosives- do that shit with a pick like a goddamn man. You haven't really seen confused rage until your child discovers hundreds of unexplained and unexplainable brutalist towers extending into the distance like the gravestones of alien gods when they thought you were building a farm over the next hill.
- . . . I gotta tour one of your worlds someday
  Shit like this I have only seen in a Manga once, forgot the name, but basically bunch of robots that humanity made were let loose without humans(they died) and they kept building giant megastructures for no reason without stopping It's just absolutely surreal and I just love it

Assassin's Creed. The actual gameplay is almost never as interesting as just walking around a meticulous recreation of ancient civilizations as a digital tourist.

Who amongst us hasn't played GTA at least once while trying to drive around and follow all the traffic laws for absolutely no reason at all
- There's a wonderful contrarian-but-is-it-really-considering-it's-making-the-lawful-choice delight in trying to follow the rules in a game about breaking rules.
  No-commentary video of someone just driving in GTA trying to follow the rules of the road. I'm usually really not a video person, but just watching this feels nice somehow.
- Every time I log into that game I like to pick a car from my garage, smoke a fatty (in RL), and then drive all slow and chill from my apartment to the golf course. Pretend like I'm afraid of getting pulled over! Then I play a quick 9 holes. Generally, after that, I'm done with GTA for another month or so.
- Oh, yeah! Get a car, find a quite park, turn on the radio and chill.
- Hmm. Nope.
  That's what Streets of SimCity was for!
  
  Well unless you did sunday driving... And put weapons on your car so you could go around demolishing the buildings you had built up in Sim City.

I like playing games that incentivise stealth as Michael Bay films. Give me rocket launchers and c4. Yeah I don't have the high score for the level but I will kill literally every single non-vital NPC.

The only way to play NASCAR games is to drive backwards and see how many cars you can involve in a wreck.
- I remember in the original 1990's NASCAR Racing game, I discovered a glitch where if I managed hit an AI car into the outer wall a certain way while driving backwards, it would launch said AI car backwards at some incredible rate of speed which could make for some spectacular wrecks.
  Anyhow, that's what I spent most of time doing.
- Might as well play Flatout, you get nos from the damage you cause.
  
  Or wreckfest

I collect all the stars since GTA III.
I also play everything on Easy because I have a life.

Like playing Gwent instead of fighting monsters as the witcher?
- An argument could be made that Gwent offers better gameplay than the larger game in which it resides.
  
  Then you purchased a wrong game and should just play solitaire.
  Witcher 3 is absolutely great, but if you just go through only the main quest, won't explore the world and won't do side quests then I can see you ending up disappointed.
  What I like is that side quests can impact the main quest and even the ending.
  
  There is no argument if the statement is objectively true
  The Witcher 3's gameplay was so bad that I couldn't finish it (the map and the quests' gameplay part too, but that's another story). Gwent was pretty cool though
  
  Are we certain Witcher is the larger game in which Gwent resides and not the other way around?
  
  An argument could be made that you are a genius. Both arguments would be equally wrong.

This is a very mild violation, but I like to play these puzzles: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
...except that I create a custom difficulty level which is quite a step below the easiest difficulty and then I almost rather speedrun the puzzles.
The Rectangles puzzle at 5x5 size has been my crack for the past months and I'm at about 13 seconds now (using my phone as input).
I mean, it's very casual speedrunning. No one cares about my time, so I actually never timed myself before just now. But yeah, I just like the different challenge of thinking fast rather than complex.

I often use cheats to remove grindy and boring bits beyond a certain point. Usually the difficulty curve is pretty bad and a game is only hard or challenging in the beginning. So I play as intended until I reach a point at which it's just a matter of time and not skill. So I just give myself a ton of crafting mats or currency or whatever so I can focus on the fun and interesting parts of the game.

I actually don't know the way you're supposed to beat Super Metroid "correctly." I've always done what I ended up learning was a major sequence break resulting from a bunch of bomb jumps to get the power bomb early, and use that to get some other stuff that allows me to beat the game out of order.
I also never start Metroid Prime without immediately getting the double jump. I used to be up there on speed running that game. I don't play the player's choice or switch versions whenever I decide to crack it out. The original was literal perfection.

Rocket League, apparently.
What a save!

I play heavily modded Elder Scrolls, where my character never touches the main story.
My favorite Morrowind run was a princess who ended up creating an agricultural baron, buying up every plantation and owning probably hundreds of slaves. She also got into the skooma business on the side (needed money for all of her dresses). Morrowind had a ton of wacky mods that were just fun to play in general - people made Star Wars and LOTR questlines. There’s also the work of Tommy Khajiit (RIP), which is something unique and which has never gotten the respect it deserved. (Or Lady Rae - she liked to recolor the game bright neon colors, and basically got bullied out of the modding community.)
Skyrim is a hunting/vagrant simulator for me. I usually play a Dunmer refugee and avoid the in-game quests entirely. Survival and economy mods to make the focus of the gameplay getting enough gold to afford a room for the night, tweaks to loot to make things more “mundane.”
The Sims for me is either 1800s Utah polygamous Mormons, post apocalyptic Handmaid’s Tale scenarios, or prisons.
- I always like to see people who go all in on the roleplaying in RPGs.
  I do wish people would leave mods that aren't for them alone. There are a bunch of mods extremely not to my taste that I just scroll past instead of intentionally clicking to tell the mod author just how much it is not to my taste and that they should not have made it because I am uninterested in the content.
  
  Modding is a really under appreciated art form.
  Downloading unhinged Morrowind mods in the mid naughts exposed me to new franchises, music, ideas… Like this banger, which plays at some point in the Underground 2 along with this one. (btw, Dawnguard is Emil or whoever wrote it ripping off story beats from a 20 year old Morrowind mod based on the Underworld series lol - play both and don’t tell me that the Soul Cairn sequence isn’t inspired…)
- I'm not into mods but if I remember right, isn't Lady Rae the one who left the modding community and started making music?
  
  Did she make music? Holy shit - if you have a link I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to her for years. She’s genuinely a major inspiration for my painting and art.

For a while, I played the MMO Guild Wars 2 as a music simulator. It has playable in game musical instruments that you can equip, and play with the number keys. A-G are represented with the numbers 1-8 with 9 and 0 swapping an octave lower or higher. Killing monsters? Doing dungeons? Raids and world bosses? Nah I'm just chilling on a beautiful forested cliffside near a waterfall figuring out an arrangement for the Lord of the Rings theme.

I'm starting a run of Project Zomboid without zombies
- Ah, the upstate Michigan run.
  Abandoned towns with no enemies except your own crushing poverty.
- Ooooh but this makes some sense though, it just becomes a post apocalyptic world then
  
  Exactly... I'm enjoying it very much so far.

I'm playing Overwatch but actually having fun while doing so /s
- Banned
  The player exploited the game mechanics to achieve an unintended side effect.

I used to just cruise around in The Crew, enjoying a chill ride around

For some time I used Minecraft as a mindnumbing tool. I dug a huge underground structure with stone pickaxes. I had some chests of wood down there to make new pickaxes, chests, and torches, and dug an underground space of several square kilometers, 30ish layers high.

Any of The Forest games become basically a zipline simulator once that is unlocked.
As in, clear fell the forest so we can build ziplines everywhere.

Mindustry It goes from a tower defense game to a logistics game for me Forget enemies, How can I haul the most amount of shit down data pipelines without letting a single container hold items for too long? My worlds are just a absolute mess of conveyor belts going everywhere, transport drones coming and going, items being produced, used, machined and consumed everywhere And the only purpose is to give me more endpoints to grow it
- I gave Mindustry a shot and faded out at the tower defense bit of the tutorial. I do like !automationgames@lemmy.zip even though tower defense is not my thing, so I'm wondering: how do you manage to forget enemies and just make it a logistics game?

I like to play crusader kings II from the point of view of God. Using console commands, sketchy cheat mod, and knowing the right game mechanics you can make characters do all types of crazy stuff. Using the "observe" console command let's you play as a spectator, you can use the "play" command followed by a character ID and you will jump into playing as that character. I like to find a character, give them insane stats, and give them all of the best traits, make them immortal and then spectate for a few hundred years and see what my chosen one made the world into. I also like to try to determine before hand what I want them to do, like becoming emperor of brittania or whatever, and see how close I can get from just 1 or 2 interactions with them.
- This is such a cool idea. Nudging a few things around and trying to see what ripple effects they have…

Watch Dogs 2. I’ve barely touched the story and just mess around.
- I love invading people's games and then never hacking them. It doesn't tell them you've invaded so you can just mess with them covertly and pretend to be an NPC.

I played the story in GTA a few times.

The only way you can play soccer games is to see how many of your team can get red carded by end of match.
- i, too, enjoy football violence!

I did that with RTS like Starcraft or Age of Empires II. I would just build a city, develop every upgrade, build good defenses and basically play it like Sim City

I play Trailmakers which is like Legos where people mostly build planes and tanks to shoot each other, but I build cranes, forklifts, trucks and boats and fill them with the barrels and crates from around the maps and move them to other places. Very peaceful and rewarding to me.

About half the time I play Cyberpunk 2077 as a first-person RPG. The other half of the time I just play it as a city/driving-simulator.

There are a few mobile or web idle/incremental games I have used as a substitute for a Pomodoro timer. Oh, I am really into the game and it only progresses if this is the focused tab? I really want to make progress, but I am in a period of the game where active play isn't that rewarded, and just watching the screen while I wait to earn the upgrade is pretty boring? How about we just leave my phone with that as the active tab, and I check back when the upgrade should be earned? Keeps me off my phone and doing the actual things I should be doing instead. Somehow, "abusing" games like this works better for me than the Forest app which has the explicit intention of making sure you do not touch your screen for a set length of time and instead do something else off your phone.

I also "abuse" Pokémon Masters EX in a similar fashion. You're expected to level up with some combination of putting them through battles that cost stamina to play through, and some pretty easy-to-obtain level-up items. And although there is an Auto option I have a feeling you are intended to manually do the battles in-game. Instead, I start story mode battles which cost no stamina to play through, that still reward me with XP no matter how many times I repeat it, and have the game fight the battle for me with the Auto setting. I check back when the battle is done and restart it. I have essentially turned this into an idle/incremental game, albeit one with a pretty short time between waiting and checking back in on the game. Free level-ups! Even though it does take much longer than the intended way, which is why I suspect nobody tried to prevent this method from working. I like doing this for some reason, and it's probably the main reason I still keep this game downloaded despite my usual allergy to gacha games.
- Huh, never knew my approach to work had an actual name. That's neat! Thanks for teaching me something new.

Most games I play that I don't plan on playing a lot of. I use trainers hacks and cheats on things I find grindy or just feels pointless. Or unnecessary hard games.

I don’t think I’ve ever actually played a story mission in Just Cause 4

I played stealth games like Hitman like a mass murderer.
I also play the "infiltrator" class in Mass Effect without tactical cloak. I mean it's a mix of soldier and engineer, why should it be focused on stealth ?

battlefield 2042... unless i have a squad or some friends, i rarely play the objective. i mess around with gadgets, try to fly the wingsuit to weird places, try to launch vehicles where they don't belong, try to find clever ways to kill people, whatever. my score is always trash and my team hates me but i'm usually having a great time.

I guess risk of rain 2.
I've fought the boss before but never any of the new ones. I don't touch lunar items I just get to the last teleporter and loop around again and again. I rarely end the game I just play until I get bored and then close the game.
Still got like 400 something hours in the game on steam and on PS4 that I don't even know

I mostly play according to the intended game design. The only exceptions that come to mind at the moment are:
Open world games (GTA, Fallouts, Elder Scroll series etc) - I tend to act like a normal, civilian part of the world. I eat and drink, travel like a person rather than player (i.e. safely, without quick travel), avoid violence and do peaceful tasks when possible. I also go on trips and take screenshots of the scenery.
Finally, if there's an equipment system I limit myself to "reasonable" amount of baggage (both in terms of weight and volume).
Mirror's Edge and Portal - the only games I learned to the point of speedrunning. I'm nowhere near the level of being able to compete with professionals (nor am I interested in that) but I can get through both pretty quickly and without issues.

Speedrunning

Almost all of them. Including the game of life.

Hah. As a kid I used to just hang out or make up stories in Lucasarts games, like Monkey Island and especially Maniac Mansion. I know I wasn't alone, because there were multipe contemporary games built around that idea, including form Lucas, even before The Sims came out. Toe Jam and Earl 2: Panic on Funkotron was also a good, weird roleplaying avenue.
And I did engage in some amount of "let's make my house in this map editor" back when games came with map editors. We all did, I think.
Oh, and some games I'd play just to listen to the music. It's hard to argue this was unintended, though, given how many games had sound test modes. I remember I'd fire up Panzer Dragoon just to gawk at the intro, which I realize seems silly if you look at it now.
- I fondly remember when my parents bought a new house that had yet to be built. I took all the drawings and made a Doom map so I could show my parents what their house would look like.
- Panic on Funkotron is a great for that. It has light platforming, chill vibes, and great tunes. It's a great game world to just hang out in.
  
  It has tons of emotes (or things that can double as emotes) and multiplayer. In a world where making game characters expressive was not a thing, much less at the player's command, they felt like puppets.

Some friends and I play multi-world randomizers together. Randomizers modify a game so that important items/unlocks are in different locations or are obtained in a different way. I usually play Ocarina of Time and a randomizer changes all the "treasure chest" items found throughout the world, so instead of finding the bow in the Forest Temple (where it should be in the game), it could be found behind a rock in a cave in the middle of the field. I constantly have to ask myself "What items don't I have yet?" and "What areas do I have access to that I haven't searched yet?" It turns the game into a kind of puzzle game. There is a website we use called Archipelago.gg that lets you connect randomizers together. I can play an OOT randomizer and my friend can be playing a Pokemon Emerald randomizer, and when I open a chest I can find items from his game and he gets a gym badge, an HM, or something else dropped into his inventory. And it works the other way when he beats another trainer, he could get one of my items and I get some rupees, or a hookshot dropped into my inventory.

I used to play Jet Moto solely to do tricks. I remember there being level geometry that could send you hundreds of feet in the air.

This is pretty much the basis for the entire speed-running community. Maybe not totally different (like walking around as a peaceful tourist in Hitman), but definitely not utilizing mechanics as intended

Splatoon
Play dualies, focus purely on anniahlating children with complete disregard for the objective.