01 Nov 2021 - Graham
previously: life of pablo
Several of you noted that last week’s essay portion was too small a bite. Today’s is a more substantial snack.
Kate D. says that, if I was an addict, I was a high-functioning one. Thanks, Mom :)
Adam N. shared this extra GTD gem.
There’s much debate on video game addiction. One problematic, but simple and obvious indicator is time played. Some say that 2 hours a day is a warning sign.
So how much did I play?
Over 13 months, I spent 624 hours playing Warzone. That averages to 1.6 hours per day. But then we should also add in the hours I spent watching other people play and training before playing. Let’s say that was half as much time (which would be a low estimate) so, 312 hours. That brings my average to 2.4 hours a day, which just clears the diagnostic hurdle.
I can’t help but think about how else I could have spent those 936 hours. But if I think that way, I’m just making a judgment about the value of video games. I’m just judging that it would have been better to yoga or write or hang out with Jubilee the dog.
Perhaps those judgments are justified. But would I have used my time more productively in the absence of video games? After all this was lock-down. Who was using time well? Had I not picked up video games, I probably would have watched TV or moped about. And playing was at least a COVID-safe way to socialize. Playing allowed me to deepen relationships with friends old and new, and I cannot thank the friends I played with enough.
So lost time, even so much time, wasn’t really the problem. Time is merely the canary in the coal mine. The dead canary is sad, but the real problem is the methane gas that killed it.
Had Warzone taken only 936 finite hours, I would not call it an addiction. It was an addiction because it consumed all of my attention.
Warzone is a potent distraction, an immersive fantasy. That’s why I played. I wanted to be distracted, immersed in an alternate reality. During lockdown, the best thing I could do for the “real world” was to stay out of it. Playing video games, however, was not the best thing I could do for myself.
The problem was that Warzone consumed me even when I wasn’t playing. After playing, I mentally replayed my mistakes. Ruminating. Planning how it would go differently next time. Always, I craved another game so that I could get the next guy like the last guy got me.
It wasn’t even that fun.
It was thrilling. At first, I lost many tense fights because my hands were shaking too much to control the mouse. When I stood up after playing, sweat (ew!) often dripped down my side. Even the seemingly passive act of watching other people play set my heart racing.
It was alluring, too. The game is peppered with small rewards–dopamine hits–like opening the glowing boxes of loot or the thunk thunk thunk of successfully hitting an enemy.
But these rewards are fleeting, unsatisfactory. A kill only made me want more. And it is telling that I never stopped after a win. I might have told myself that kills and wins motivated me. But really, it was my losses, failures, deaths that stuck with me and kept me coming back.
My kill/death ratio started at 0.8, which is around average. That means, for every 9 times I ran into an enemy, they killed me 5 times and I killed them 4 times. Like the average player, I lost more interactions than I won.
And those numbers actually understate the degree of frustration in Warzone. The average player wins slightly less than half their fights, but because each game involves many fights, most players win less than 1% of their games. Many players never win.
Why, you might wonder, would anyone, let alone hundreds of millions of people, play a game they almost never win?
For my part, I found the frustration to be a compelling challenge.
In response to the frustration, I developed a comprehensive training plan: To improve my eye-mouse coordination, I played an aim-training game daily. While waiting for friends to log on, I took on teams of two, alone, as a kind of resistance training. I watched explainer videos to learn specific button sequences for special moves. I became an expert in gun attachments. And I watched streamers late into the night, supposedly for inspiration.
I did improve. After months of effort, my k/d rose to 1.5, putting me in the top 10% of all players. From this peak, I won a whopping 4% of my games. This quantifiable, concrete growth appealed to my analytic and competitive brain. But, ultimately, this growth only had meaning within the game.
I knew I was a hamster on a wheel. I thought this self-awareness gave me some power over the game. But surely hamsters must also know they aren’t going anywhere. Perhaps they too justify their running habit by timing their splits and counting their laps and telling themselves a story about growth.
If you missed SIDETRACKED last week, we listened to Kayne’s Life of Pablo mostly because I love the first track: Ultralight Beam.
Tune in tomorrow (Tuesday) at 2p AKT (aka 6p ET for those of you suffering from eastern-time-centrism) if you want the live experience: https://kruaradio.org. I haven’t mastered the phone yet, but text or email me during the show with suggestions or heckles.
Thanks to Sean F. for sharing an exclusive first peek at a still-in-progress track from The Brothers and the Fool.
next post: sylvan esso