Games: Our Fascinating Obsession

And Other Musings On This Topic. 👾

Games. They’re everywhere. From a virtual perspective (on phones, tablets, computers, Playstations, Nintendos, etc), to the IRL sports and hobbies that we partake in (football matches, chess games, cross country races, etc) and to the simple games we play to pass time during long car journeys or boring school classes (looking at you Math), such as I Spy or Tic Tac Toe.

But what is it about virtual games that keep us coming back to them?

My first guess came to me on a 3-day long attempt to reach the top position on the daily leaderboards of the globally recognised app, Piano Tiles (also referred to more simply as Don’t Tap The White Tile).

When you’re playing this game for such lengthy amounts at a time and going for such high scores your brain can get a little bit bored. Or rather when you settle into a constant rhythm you might be placing 40% of your attention on the task at hand and the remaining 60% on the idle wanderings of the mind.

From previous experience with the app, I was already aware of this. That’s why I thought ‘what better way to immerse myself in the question at hand then to actually play a game and see where my head goes’.

What I’m referring to here, I actually read recently from a book called Focus: The Hidden Driver Of Excellency by Daniel Goleman, in which he says that 90% of the time when we get distracted or loose our focus on something, we are almost always considering problems we’re facing in our lives {social problems (i.e relationship issues, etc), work problems (i.e coming up with creative ways to market a product, etc), etc} and trying to come up with solutions for them. So Goleman advises not to punish ourselves for our “day dreaming” as we normally would, viewing it as us simply wandering away from the present task, but rather looking at it from the perspective that we are actually wandering towards something. A mental breakthrough or the birth of an idea.

So after using this as a basis for my gaming session, I couldn’t help but be drawn to the fact that you have to be extremely immersed in Piano Tiles to do well. For me that meant putting one song on repeat (in particular Ursine Vulpine’s Do You Realise, you may recognise it as the Transformers 5 trailer song) and blasting it through my earphones.

To me, it really felt like I was isolating myself. Like I was blocking out the whole world, just focusing my attention (not completely, as I said) on those little incoming black rectangles. I couldn’t help think about how I was shutting everything else out. In fact I could see why some people use games as a form of escapism from the struggles they face in everyday lives.

Famous rapper, Logic, says in this interview with Genius (formerly Rap Genius), lyric annotation app, that some of his earliest memories were of playing video games and that he used them to escape from having to walk a mile and a half every day to his job, which he hated, at Wingstop. On top of that, living in his sisters basement trying to make it as a professional in the hip hop game, being bi-racial, growing up around people selling narcotics. His brother distributing crack to his own father. The list goes on and on.

Also, I actually managed to place first on the leaderboards for a day! 😙

My second guess came to me while playing the open world, action game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. As I set up a new gameplay I came to the familiar “create your character” part, where I had to pick what race my character would be and customise him/her to my liking from there. It set me thinking about how these type of games that allow you to build your own player, allow you to build a virtual representation of yourself based on how you would like to see yourself. Not how you do see yourself. But how you would like to be seen.

Maybe it’s why games like World of Warcraft are so popular. Because they allow players to create these virtual personas where they can be anybody they want to be. Anybody they can possibly imagine. Except for themselves.

Something I find extremely saddening. Because it creates this idea that the people playing these games arn’t comfortable or happy with themselves.

But that’s just a thought and not a statement. What I’m saying is all these people might not necessarily be that way, but you can bet your bottom dollar a certain percentage are at least.

Which is unsurprising, I mean if you give this ability to the general public some people are going to use it in this way. Because I mean no one is perfect and I’m sure we’d all like to change something about ourselves, whether it be something to do with the way we look or a personality trait. So given the chance, isn’t it obvious that some people would take this to the extreme and create entirely different versions of themselves online?

Finally, my third guess on the subject is probably the most readily visible one, tech.

I mentioned this recently in a post I wrote about why I stopped using Snapchat; these games (mobile apps in particular!) have such sticky mechanisms in place to keep us returning to them.

Something that I recently observed validated this.

After having his phone recently fixed, one of my friends told me that as soon as he turned it on, even though it had only been turned off for a week or so, it began buzzing like crazy. Like really crazy. He was at a point where he thought the thing would explode in his hand.

It turns out this crazy buzzing was actually him receiving notifications to keep his streak alive and collect his daily prize on the popular app 8 Ball Pool.

I mean it just shows how much we are bombarded by push notifications, Messenger Ptoingggs and email updates in our daily lives.

Don’t believe me?

Count how many times your phone buzzes in a day and get back to me on it.

Even better, count how many times you picked up your phone after it buzzed.

You’ll see how much you really cling to it.

We as humans can’t help but be addicted to notifications. It’s a consequence of our narcissistic personalities. And the people who make these mobile games and apps know this and use it against us to make money. Unfortunately.

One thing all these reasons have in common: they’re going to evolve. And change. And mutate. Because games are constantly evolving, with new formats of gaming being ushered in all the time, whether it’s the latest X-Box, Occulus Rift, iPhone, etc. So of course how we use them is going to change too. You would be a fool not see that. I only hope that our ability not be controlled by our creations, prevails. 🎮

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