How do you stay motivated to play the game?

I also got bored form time to time. But since a few months I'm a storyteller. I love to take pics and document the life of the Sims. Never noticed how much fun it makes before! And if you share your work and get feedback it keeps you motivated to continue. Well, that's what helped me ;).

I am the same with you for a lot of challenges. I will start off and then once it becomes easier the further you get I quit. I don't really try to stay motivated though. If it isn't fun anymore it isn't fun anymore. Play the game to have fun, no stress. Occasionally I will come up with mini challenges in my challenges to try and make it hard again but there's nothing wrong with quitting eventually. I do wish sim traits mattered more so it feels like you are playing different characters.

The one and ONLY challenge I've completed was one I wrote for myself. It's my own version of the gigolo challenge. But as for staying motivated I don't have much of it right now. That will change here soon, I just have to remake my most precious sims and that is what I'm not having much motivation for.

i enjoy taking (mostly) candid photos. then i choose lyrics that match their mood/my story ideas and upload them. my Sims are really into music. <3

I take breaks when I feel like my game is getting stale. I'll play something else, or concentrate on building/remodeling. With the upcoming jungle pack, I have a collector Sim who has already finished the aspiration (thanks to the City Posters collection) and I've got her working on another aspiration while she works on her garden (in case there are any new plants) and I've also got her working on Herbalism (got to figure there are narsty bugs in the jungle to repel). The storyline is that she ran away from home as a teenager to escape her evil father who was planning to marry her off to one of his business partners' son to seal a deal. The family lawyer helped her access some of the money in her trust fund, so she moved into an apartment in San Myshuno on her own for a bit, and with some freelance work and hacking she was able to earn enough for a farmhouse in Newcrest. Ultimate goal is for her to complete as many collections as she can before she dies then the next generation will take over -- I'm not sure if she's going to marry her friend Tyler Butterfield, a game-generated vampire she's currently good friends ith, or if she'll marry Liam O'Dourke who just moved to town and was her only friend back home (her father discouraged fraternization with the lower classes, but she met Liam when she was hanging out at the museum looking at the space alien collection and they became friends).

play rotationally
stick to one family only for as long you are not bored, if bored move to another or set a new into the neighborhood
if you find some family too boring to even play them once in a while set them out of the neighborhood for good & replace with some other sims

also try to make the families as different as possible, single sims, loners, traditional families with kids, business sims, computer nerds ...
don't stay only on the home lot, this makes it very boring, go out with your sims & do something else with them than you do with the other families, try not to repeat the same life set up for the different families

also don't play with aging on, age them up on your terms, first if you think that they should move to the next age state
have more control over the sims you're playing, don't be driven by the game, play the sims with free will on & direct them if the sims don't take you where you want to go with that particular family
try to develop a connection with the family you're playing, so you know what their life is about


& if you have GT, play clubs as the main free time activity, make different clubs for different sims
dancing & night clubs are a good additional thing for your sims to do something

i would also recommend
GTW for all sorts of shops & if you want to have sims buy something in person instead to just stay home, which makes it usually very boring
Dine Out GP for restaurants to visit with your sims
Movie Hangout SP to make movie theaters & meet with some of the clubs there
Spa Day GP gives you also some more to do with your sims on a daily basis

i own more packs than those but those mainly add somewhat decent gameplay to the daily life of sims

If I start feeling bored, I'll take a break. Then when I come back I have new ideas or there is new content available.

I also don't use cheats to make things easier in the game. No money cheats, not even free real estate; nor unlocking rewards early. So when my sims do achieve something like an aspiration or top of their career, it feels like an achievement.

I tend to use a random generator for traits, career, and aspiration, but am not super strict about it.

For a long time I was playing one large rotational save, and when I got bored I rotated to the next family. That was a lot of fun. I love playing rotationally.

Right now, however, I am playing a kind of "relaxed" legacy. I started using MCCC to add story progression and it's very interesting to see who hooks up with who and what children are born in-world. I play with aging on and set to Normal. I will let some sims use the Potion of Youth once or twice. Otherwise I let my sims die off naturally because it keeps fresh and moving. If they don't make the goals I've set for them, oh well. There's always the next generation.

I do several things:
The main one is taking many breaks. I'll play for a few days then put that save on hold for a while and go off to other activities, either other games or non computer related things entirely. Usually when I come back I'm excited to see what they'll do next.

Another thing I do is actively do the activities that I tend to shy away from for one reason or another. Some of them I don't do because I've convinced myself I'll hate them and often find that its either not as bad as I thought, or that I really enjoy them. (like the social butterfly aspiration. I'd based my dislike of it on previous sims games like sims 1 where making friends was difficult and frustrating.)

Also, I dig through the stories and legacies forum here for the small/short challenges (the ones that don't last 5-10 generations) And add them into my normal legacy style play. Sometimes they fit quite well into my normal rule-set legacies and it spices them up a lot.

I also tend to make my poor little sims lives a little more difficult by throttling back how much money they make. If I feel they're getting too rich and their lives are becoming too easy or too comfy too quickly, I'll ctrl/shift/c testingcheats on and use the money cheat to remove simoleons from their lives. Can't tell ya how many times I've (probably evilly) used 'money 0' on my third or fourth generation legacy houses :D

As I've noted in other threads, I also play on short life span because I tend to get bored and impatient to see the next generation so that staves off much of the boredom too trying to finish aspirations before the sim kicks the bucket.

When the game becomes repetitive you have to play something else until the need to play returns or some new features are incorporated into the game. Popular games other than the Sims goes through the same thing. However, it happens sooner in some games than others.

it's a video game, not a job.
if you aren't having fun maybe it's time to find a new game or hobby.