Brains are tricky things. Infinitely complex, or at least far more complex than we can grasp.
Which makes it very hard to consciously and actively change the way a brain works.
That shouldn't mean that you're stuck with the particular pile of neurons that you were given, but it sure can feel that way.
Let's start with an innocent and fun example, for some people something like this is mesmerising to look at.
Other people might not see the point, but it's harmless. Just a subset of the brain-machines releasing pleasure chemicals at a weird time.
But... it isn't always harmless when that happens, and I want to talk about the potential form it can take that I've struggled with over the years.
Videogame addiction might not be classified as a distinct medical condition at time of writing, but that doesn't mean it's not a real thing. And I really like videogames, and tend to get a bit too into things that I get into. It's very much all or nothing with me.
That's pretty much fine when it means that you want to have and read every Discworld book (definitely some reviews of those coming eventually), but it becomes a problem when it starts replacing other activities in your life.
And that has been a problem for me. When The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind came around I didn't do much else for months. I fell into similar holes when I got my hands on Diablo I and II, and there are few Final Fantasy or Disgaea/NIS games where I haven't clocked in >100 hours.
But the first real signs of trouble became apparent to me when I discovered social games.
Surely, I hear you say, I can't be talking about those dumb Facebook games like Farmville. But that is exactly the type of game I'm talking about. The reason I fell into these games so hard is because something changed in the design philosophy behind these games. The sprawling role playing videogames of yore that I lost weekends and summers to were replaced by very focused, very limited experiences that were just out to maximise engagement with and retention of the player.
My life started revolving around timers in shallow games, ticking down in real time until I could harvest my proverbial crops. The games I fell into the hardest weren't really about crops (most of the time), instead they were the ones that still had a semblance of RPG on the top, but it's counterproductive both to you the audience and me the confessing addict, to really go into a lot of detail here.
I've quit playing social games. It was a tough thing to distance myself from, but it was for the best.
Even though I had never spent a cent on one, they had cost me far too much.
Cookie Clicker wasn't the first example, but it was definitely the big one that people know. A reductively simple game where you get a cookie every time you click a giant cookie. Try to see how many cookies you can get!
But, that's not all there is to it. Once you gather up 15 cookies you can trade those in for an automated in-game cursor that clicks for you every 10 seconds, with the option to buy a second one at a slightly higher cookie price. Once you get to 100 cookies you can hire a sweet old grandma to bake 1 cookie per second for you!
And... well, it spirals out into more and more unlocks from there.
And that's a fun concept! There is ambition and skill on display here to subvert the inane premise.
Unlocking all cookie clicker has to show you will take weeks of occasional checking in on it (the titular clicking is not a significant part of your cookie income before long), and the game even keeps making cookies for you while you're offline so you don't have to waste power keeping the game open.
But, as we discovered at the start of this article, different brains react in different ways.
I never truly fell into Cookie Clicker as deeply as some others have, but I'd say I've spent a few dozen active hours playing the game.
Was it a groundbreaking videogame experience that has stuck with me? Well, not really. But in hindsight it still genuinely feels like less of a waste of time compared to my Farmville days.
The game is a weird passion project made by a single person, it's not out to get your money and is instead trying to do something weird with the limited premise it sets up.
This was an example of where I (by my own standards) didn't really fall into the game though. And unfortunately there are more than a few cases where I did stumble.
Let's talk about the big one for me, the game that is on the top of that time-sorted list of games up there. Because I fell into that one harder than I'd care to admit. Idling to Rule the Gods isn't dissimilar to Cookie Clicker in its core concept, except that it's not about cookies and there's no clicking element.
Instead it gives you a slightly customisable protagonist that tries to fight Gods to be the strongest there ever was. Compared to other games this immediately checked several boxes for me.
Which makes it very hard to consciously and actively change the way a brain works.
That shouldn't mean that you're stuck with the particular pile of neurons that you were given, but it sure can feel that way.
Let's start with an innocent and fun example, for some people something like this is mesmerising to look at.
Moving in a straight line despite rotation center
Other people might not see the point, but it's harmless. Just a subset of the brain-machines releasing pleasure chemicals at a weird time.
But... it isn't always harmless when that happens, and I want to talk about the potential form it can take that I've struggled with over the years.
Videogame Addiction
That's pretty much fine when it means that you want to have and read every Discworld book (definitely some reviews of those coming eventually), but it becomes a problem when it starts replacing other activities in your life.
And that has been a problem for me. When The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind came around I didn't do much else for months. I fell into similar holes when I got my hands on Diablo I and II, and there are few Final Fantasy or Disgaea/NIS games where I haven't clocked in >100 hours.
But the first real signs of trouble became apparent to me when I discovered social games.
Surely, I hear you say, I can't be talking about those dumb Facebook games like Farmville. But that is exactly the type of game I'm talking about. The reason I fell into these games so hard is because something changed in the design philosophy behind these games. The sprawling role playing videogames of yore that I lost weekends and summers to were replaced by very focused, very limited experiences that were just out to maximise engagement with and retention of the player.
My life started revolving around timers in shallow games, ticking down in real time until I could harvest my proverbial crops. The games I fell into the hardest weren't really about crops (most of the time), instead they were the ones that still had a semblance of RPG on the top, but it's counterproductive both to you the audience and me the confessing addict, to really go into a lot of detail here.
I've quit playing social games. It was a tough thing to distance myself from, but it was for the best.
Even though I had never spent a cent on one, they had cost me far too much.
And along comes the Idle Game...
That would have been a fun and concise cautionary tale about the dangers of social games, but unfortunately the story doesn't stop there. A new wave was coming.Cookie Clicker wasn't the first example, but it was definitely the big one that people know. A reductively simple game where you get a cookie every time you click a giant cookie. Try to see how many cookies you can get!
But, that's not all there is to it. Once you gather up 15 cookies you can trade those in for an automated in-game cursor that clicks for you every 10 seconds, with the option to buy a second one at a slightly higher cookie price. Once you get to 100 cookies you can hire a sweet old grandma to bake 1 cookie per second for you!
And... well, it spirals out into more and more unlocks from there.
And that's a fun concept! There is ambition and skill on display here to subvert the inane premise.
Unlocking all cookie clicker has to show you will take weeks of occasional checking in on it (the titular clicking is not a significant part of your cookie income before long), and the game even keeps making cookies for you while you're offline so you don't have to waste power keeping the game open.
But, as we discovered at the start of this article, different brains react in different ways.
I never truly fell into Cookie Clicker as deeply as some others have, but I'd say I've spent a few dozen active hours playing the game.
Was it a groundbreaking videogame experience that has stuck with me? Well, not really. But in hindsight it still genuinely feels like less of a waste of time compared to my Farmville days.
The game is a weird passion project made by a single person, it's not out to get your money and is instead trying to do something weird with the limited premise it sets up.
This was an example of where I (by my own standards) didn't really fall into the game though. And unfortunately there are more than a few cases where I did stumble.
Let's talk about the big one for me, the game that is on the top of that time-sorted list of games up there. Because I fell into that one harder than I'd care to admit. Idling to Rule the Gods isn't dissimilar to Cookie Clicker in its core concept, except that it's not about cookies and there's no clicking element.
Instead it gives you a slightly customisable protagonist that tries to fight Gods to be the strongest there ever was. Compared to other games this immediately checked several boxes for me.
- Basically an RPG
- You get to have Pets
- Incrementally unlock new features
- A decent story line
- A community of friendly players (to chat with through Discord or similar, this is entirely a single player game)
But the real hooks didn't become apparent until I had played casually for a few weeks. The above list would have kept me interested for a while, but it doesn't explain the horrendous fall into this game that is literally just watching bars fill up.
To really tip the scales this game added:
- An early prestige mechanic, where you restart the story but multiply your core stats so you'll be a lot stronger next time.
- Multiple ways to permanently increase your power in various aspects of the game.
- The Pets growing stronger as well and influencing the core gameplay loop.
- In-game challenges that give further rewards that make you stronger in various ways.
- ...
I could go on, but this isn't a review, and I'm not really trying to explain the game to you here. I'll try to summarise my realisation.
The game had a large number of interconnecting systems that gave both shortterm and permanent bonuses.
And that is something my weird brain is hyper sensitive to. If a game effect lets me get something for cheaper, makes a core element stronger or lets me automatically generate something that is otherwise not normally generated, I'm almost automatically on board.
They are mechanics I favour in board games like Dominion, in card games like Magic the Gathering or that I will build my party around in 'real' RPGs like Disgaea. Part of me knows that these aren't the optimal strategies, but that is irrelevant to the mental majority inside of me because these are the effects that I like.
So along comes a game that is filled to the brim with effects like this, and several years worth of playtime, (I use the word 'play' generously) and I am just completely lost to it.
Back I go to my Farmville mentality of planning my life around timers, because I have to be optimal and have the game open when my Pet Campaigns finish so I can send them out again immediately.
In I dive with the slowly germinating spreadsheet that tracks my accomplishments, priorities and plans within the game. (Something I have tried to apply to real life on several occasions, but never quite have gotten to work, at least not anything like this successfully).
Gaming does not exist inside of a vacuum, and this... well, devotion to the game impacted my life quite a bit.
Did I lose my health, my job or my relationship over it? Fortunately, no. But it put far more strain on all three than I should ever have accepted.
It got to the point where the game was on 24/7, trying to do the optimal thing at all times, making progress for the sake of progress.
Even though there is no endgame, there is no win-state.
Eventually the friction the game caused in my life won out over the addiction that had been taking over more and more of it and I uninstalled it.
Doing so felt weird. I wasn't sad or relieved or even particularly angry. I was just stunned I had let it get this bad.
So, all's well that ends well?
Sure, enjoy your happy ending and please stop reading right here. Bye!
...
So, there are two ways in which this happy ending is tarnished.
The most critical one is that I didn't stop playing.
Uninstalling the game isn't the same as deleting your progress, and the game could easily be connected to online games platform Kongregate or its own phone app (I've fortunately steered clear of the latter out of self-protection).
I had just made the game slightly harder to reach / have on all the time. On top of that I decided to start the most restrictive challenge in the game, mute the Discord server for the game, no longer update my spreadsheet and to only check in at rare but unspecified times. Effectively this has meant 4-10 times a week for ~2 minutes each.
It was my hope that this would slowly wean me off the game.
I've managed to stick to this regiment for 3.5 months now, but it's not giving me much weaning. My life isn't consumed by the game anymore, but I had hoped to just... quietly forget about it as I enjoy other media again.
But it's still there, like a well-known siren that is trying to lure me back.
Because, and this is hard to admit for me, this really was an addiction. And probably still is. I'm managing it, but I'm still addicted.
I've considered quitting cold turkey more than once, but have always chickened out (so much room for bird puns, if only the tone wasn't so serious).
Even if I one day manage to (I hope to slowly build up the space between checkins with the game until it does actually fade from my consciousness), there is the second point.
There are always more games.
This one dumb idle game might have wounded me, but it is far from my Kryptonite. It is not the unique and only thing I am vulnerable to. A better analogy would be that it's a type of candy I overate on to the point of making myself sick.
I realised that I should definitely stop eating so much of that type of candy.
And if I know it is hard for me to control myself, maybe stop eating that candy altogether.
But no longer eating ANY candy? That's a tough proposal to accept.
Escapism can take many forms and the interactivity of videogames makes it a supremely well-suited medium to present it in, but it is important to keep a balanced diet.
This doesn't just mean being mindful of how much you eat, but also identifying what foods taste great but drain you. If a piece of media engages you it isn't automatically worth your time.
Can my diet include this one particular game? I don't know yet, but I know that I definitely don't want to eat it more than I currently do, because I know what will happen when I do and I don't want to be that person again.
There are types of candy/game that taste as good to me as this problem game, but that are only available in limited supply (like the traditional RPGs of old, that were done when they were done), and I look forward to having examples of those on my plate in the future. This can lead to brief periods of excess, like going to a party with a chocolate fountain. But it's always important that there's only so much of it, that I can finish it and move on.
I will not play MMOs for this reason, because me liking them would mean having an infinite supply of liquid chocolate. That isn't a desired outcome (and neither is playing a game I dislike). The current industry trend of Live Services is much the same, designed to drip-feed you progress and content and maximise your engagement, so I also steer well clear of those. (Which is made a lot easier by all of them being pretty garbage so far.)
Shouldn't I perhaps just stop eating candy altogether if the risks are so great?
That's the tricky question, isn't it? I'm still on the side of no. This post has its share of examples when games haven't been good for me, but there are aspects that I wouldn't have wanted to give up.
Because there are stories there that matter to me. The Final Fantasies that I adore, finishing Gone Home for the first time or finally making it all the way through NieR:Automata are experiences that have shaped me.
And I feel like I'd be a worse person if not for them.
I just need to keep an eye on what I eat.
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