Hyper-Idle Gaming

One of my big tells for being uncomfortable is pulling out my phone and pouring tons of psychological energy into a mindless game of some kind — in younger years I’d tell myself that I was actually doing the right thing by “forming associations” between the action of the game and what was going on around me, somehow priming myself for detailed recall when I picked up the game again later, but that was a hollow justification that really just led to me perpetuating bad situations rather than attending to them enough to resolve them.

I noticed myself doing this again when I got frustrated and spiraled inward during my first meeting with the Orange County Democrats; I didn’t want to leave but I didn’t want to put all of my mental energy into what was going on around me, since my frustration would just build and build until I either screamed like a burning animal or sprinted from the building or both, which struck me as rude.

So instead I was only half there, the other half of me happily falling headfirst into a world of pretty colors and ever-increasing numbers. I was playing a so-called ‘idle game’, one where you play it a little bit early on to the point where you can buy upgrades which make the game then play itself. You come back to help and to collect timed rewards and to buy even better upgrades or to just sit there and watch those numbers rise, faster and faster as you figure out better and better strategies of optimization.

That’s basically what these games are: pure optimization, gaming stripped down to a no-bullshit essence, no hiding the fact that all that you’re ever doing is solving a really fun math problem.

The game I was playing had no way to lose- the numbers could only go up, going fast when I wasn’t there or even faster when I was. I needed such a game. I was sitting there after a crushing electoral defeat listening to the local leadership avoid even the possibility of culpability, nothing even in the same zip code as the “here’s what we can do to stop this from happening again” that I had needed to hear. And so I poured my frustration into defeating unthreatening cartoon monsters that were perfectly helpless to stop me.

My upgrades did damage-per-second no matter what, even when the game was closed, but tapping on the screen did extra damage and made the monsters flinch and made bold blood-red numbers burst out of their broken bodies to show me in real time just how much damage I did. I got points for frequency, not intensity, but all the same as the meeting proceeded I found myself tapping faster and harder until I almost shattered the screen.

If you asked me what my face looked like at that time, I couldn’t tell you.

I got through the meeting and reflected on my life and resolved to do things differently. What I’d found in playing the game was that it was most rewarding to buy a few upgrades and then forget about it and then come back later to find a giant pile of gold waiting for me to spend, on more upgrades. Forgetting about it was actually how I had the most fun with it, which is the end goal of any game in the first place. It reminded me of ‘The Game’ which I heard about in high school, where the only way to win is to forget about playing it, and when you remember The Game you lose and you have to tell whoever’s near about your defeat. (Also, now that you know about The Game, you’re playing it too- and you just lost. Try to win by forgetting about it.)

My upgrades are still active even though I’ve consciously stepped away, which means that my heroes are still fighting monsters and piling up gold for nobody forever. It’s for the best- things like that carry me away from my problems, not though them.

What’s keeping me away from the game is the ever-growing hypothetical deferred reward that I’ll get when I come back later. I could pay now, or I could play later and have even more fun, which will always be true.

Maybe someday I’ll pop back in to see what my digital Sisyphus is up to, and who knows what I’ll see: maybe they’ll have a reward for me that’s greater than I can possibly imagine.