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September 10, 2007
"Gamer regret": My latest video-game column for Wired News
Today, Wired News published my latest video-game column -- and this one is about what I call "gamer regret": A nagging sense of hollowness that plagues me every time I think about how many hundreds of hours I've spent playing games.
It's online here at the Wired News site, and a copy is archived permanently below:
Battle With 'Gamer Regret' Never Ceases
by Clive Thompson
In retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have looked.
I was 10 days into playing Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground -- a little RPG I reviewed here last month -- and I was poking around the "settings" menu. I noticed that it had a "time played" option, which shows you how long you've been toiling away at the game. Curious, I clicked it.
Thirty-six hours.
Upon which my heart sank into a fathomless pit. Thirty-six hours? How in god's name had I managed to spend almost four hours a day inside this game? I should point out that this was not the only game I'd been playing during that time. I'd also been hip-deep in BioShock and Space Giraffe, so I'd been planted like a weed in front of my consoles for hours more.
This is a missing-time experience so vast one would normally require a UFO abduction to achieve it.
So the question of the column, and possibly the question of my eternal soul, is: Is this good thing? How much does it change the architecture of your life to spend that much time playing games?
The dirty secret of gamers is that we wrestle with this dilemma all the time. We're often gripped by what I call "gamer regret" -- a sudden, horrifying sense of emptiness when we muse on all the other things we could have done with our game time.
Frequently, it's precipitated by those ghastly "time played" counters. The "played" command in World of Warcraft is the worst. I've known gamers who nearly went into shock after discovering they'd spent an entire month in-game each year. (According to Nick Yee's research, amazingly, this is the average -- 20 hours a week of play.)
My gamer regret usually takes the form of drawing up a humiliating list of other, potential activities I've forgone. I could have ... volunteered at a local hospital! Learned a language! Cleaned up my rats' nest of an office! Gotten a head start on a new writing project! Hell, I could have just, you know, played the guitar or something. Wouldn't that have been a less howling waste of my precious time on Earth?
Sometimes I think the inky depths of gamer regret are linked, in a fiendish calculus, to how totally awesome the game is. The higher you rise, the lower you fall. A really superb game sweeps you into its embrace because it offers a seductively controllable alternative to life. You're wrestling to master a system -- a war, a puzzle, a mystery -- that is enormously complex but, unlike the rest of our lives, actually masterable. Will Shortz, the crossword puzzle expert, once told me that the reason people love pen-and-paper puzzles is that "life presents us with all sorts of problems that don't have any single answer -- but with a crossword, there actually is one answer, and you can find it."
Yet, just like a crossword addict, when the game is over, we're left with -- what? A sense of completion? Sure, except what we've completed could be regarded as a supremely arbitrary, nonproductive task. The elation I feel when I finish is always slightly tinged with a worrisome sense of hollowness. Wouldn't I have been better off doing something that was difficult and challenging and productive?
Except, wait a minute. That's just stupid, Puritan thinking. Videogames, like crosswords, are a form of play -- and play is a key element of a healthy adult existence. As game theorist Raph Koster has always pointed out, our playful brains love to seek out patterns, to solve problems -- and there's something existentially joyful about doing this in an environment that doesn't have any stakes if you screw it up.
Or here's a more radical way of putting it: Wasting time is one of the central reasons we play. If play were productive, it wouldn't be ... play. Monday Night Football doesn't achieve anything either.
On and on it goes, the argument with myself. Thirty-six hours, what's wrong with you? Hey, I only watch one hour of TV every two weeks. Everyone's got their way to chill out, and mine's far more mentally stimulating than television. You're ignoring your family! No, I'm not. When I play games, I do it in the wee hours; I'm ignoring sleep. But that's not healthy! Screw being healthy!
All right, so maybe it's OK to play some videogames, but only in moderation. Agreed, but what counts as "moderation"?
The truth is, gamers never settle this internal debate. We ask the question, only to fail to answer it. We repress it, only to have it suddenly rise back up and bite us -- whereupon we wrestle with it, repress it, rinse and repeat.
And with that, I think I'm going to head out and sign up for some volunteer work at the local hospital.
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Clive, I don't understand what you are talking about. YOU are paid to immerse yourself in the world of technology including games, and write about it, such as THIS VERY COLUMN. For other people it can be regarded as a waste of time. Perhaps you should interview some of them and their families.
One could say, you don't need to play for 4 hours per day to write about it. I'd say, yes you do, because that's what dedicated gamers do, and you were hired for the column because that's who you are.
I'd say, whatever your leisure pursuit is, as long as you are continuing to shower, your bills are paid, your loved ones are supportive, and your life is not becoming unmanageable, there is no problem.
Posted by: Arrowyn at September 11, 2007 9:59 AM
Yeah, I understand your point -- and I actually thought about addressing it in a postscript to my column.
The reality is that my Wired News column is only a relatively small sliver of my overall income -- to be precise, it's 12% of my income. So, if we assume a standard American 50-hour workweek, I'm paid to play and write about games for six hours a week. (Actually, since the six hours includes the time it takes to write the column in addition to research it by playing the game, the portion of money going towards actual play-time probably works out to more like three hours a week.) I obviously play games way more than that, and I ain't getting any coin for the hours above six a week.
There's an understandable perception that my full-time job is to sit around and play games, but alas, most of my full-time job is researching and writing big feature articles on science and technology for print magazines. My game writing is a sideline.
Mind you, it's pretty sweet to be compensated for any of my time writing about video games! So I'm not complaining about that!
Posted by: Clive at September 11, 2007 11:52 AM
Yeah I'd have to second Arrowyn on this one. As long as X Y and Z, there isn't a problem. The issue is, that balance isn't always easy to achieve, gamers seem to find themselves at either extreme.
On the one hand you've got the hardcore WOW player, ignoring their 'real world' friends, skipping work to get home early for horde raids, never leaving the house. I've known gamers where this is reality.
On the other you've got the too-casual reviewer, the gamer who dips into a deep work and then superficially writes it off. Like anything, it's the people who 'hang around' the scene, put time into the experience even when it's not feeling productive or engaging, that ultimately understand the medium more. Maybe it's only in the 21st hour of play where that deep strategy game moves from frustration to flow. Or perhaps the game is terrible, but like a film, you can only credibly dismiss it after experiencing it in full.
Posted by: lukemunn at September 11, 2007 6:19 PM
"Like anything, it's the people who 'hang around' the scene, put time into the experience even when it's not feeling productive or engaging, that ultimately understand the medium more."
Yes, I think that's an incredibly interesting point, and cuts to the center of what makes games such a different form of culture from so many other genres. A really good game reveals layers the longer you play. I've often argued that a game review ought to be written in three stages. You do one review after playing the game for about three hours; one review after playing for a couple of days or perhaps a week; and one review after maybe a month or so. A good game often "feels" different at each point, based on one's experience with it ... and really good game criticism would take into account these changes in experience.
Alas, the economics of mainstream publishing are such that there's no money to keep a model like this alive. Indeed, this is why I've argued at various points that the best game writing and reviewing will often and maybe always be done by people from whom it isn't a job. It is the first major form of culture where the best criticism is likely to be nonpro, as it were.
Posted by: Clive at September 11, 2007 9:11 PM
Yesterday I saw an interview with Matt Damon (from earlier in the summer) where he said that the films considered for Academy Awards each year should be the ones from 10 years ago. So that this year we would have evaluated and honored performances etc. from 1997. Similar to your idea of review after a period of time has passed and reviewers have a had a deeper experience.
Posted by: Arrowyn at September 12, 2007 10:05 AM
Yeah, that's the exact concept. We should probably do the same thing for books ... award "Book of the Year" stuff 25 years hence!
Posted by: Clive at September 12, 2007 11:21 AM
I think the effect you mention is unique to videogaming precisely because of the convention you describe: that infernal "time played" timer. And it really is an odd convention, when you think about it.
As gamers, we feel the "opportunity cost" of our sessions so keenly because it is quantified, right there in front of our noses. In actuality the cost is omnipresent, regardless of the medium or nature of the entertainment. It's just not quantified so ruthlessly in most cases.
What other entertainment activities do this, really? Do you have timers on the screen as you're watching a movie in the theatre, a clock HUD on our reading materials as you lose yourself in them, a cumulative timer for a board game you play regularly?
And if we had the option of turning on such a timer, would any of us do it?
The reason for this almost ubiquitous "time played" feature in gaming is ambiguous. In a sense, I think it stems from the days when the quality of a game was assumed to be proportional to the amount of hours it would take to complete it (RPG's were, and still are proponents of this model). Designers offered the feature as a way of quantifying the user's enjoyment of the game.
This evolved into a "badge of honor" mentality among geeks; maxing out the clock became an indicator of your dedication and zeal for the game.
But games are mainstreaming, now. It's assumed to be a casual footnote in the lives of most adults in the current generation, and those adults are getting older. Their opportunity cost is diversifying. The game timer, in this new "kinder gentler...ahem older" gaming paradigm, is starting to shift away from being a badge of honor and is becoming more of a timesink manager.
Posted by: Paul at September 27, 2007 1:50 PM
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Clive, I don't understand what you are talking about. YOU are paid to immerse yourself in the world of technology including games, and write about it, such as THIS VERY COLUMN. For other people it can be regarded as a waste of time. Perhaps you should interview some of them and their families.
One could say, you don't need to play for 4 hours per day to write about it. I'd say, yes you do, because that's what dedicated gamers do, and you were hired for the column because that's who you are.
I'd say, whatever your leisure pursuit is, as long as you are continuing to shower, your bills are paid, your loved ones are supportive, and your life is not becoming unmanageable, there is no problem.
Posted by: Arrowyn![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at September 11, 2007 9:59 AM
Yeah, I understand your point -- and I actually thought about addressing it in a postscript to my column.
The reality is that my Wired News column is only a relatively small sliver of my overall income -- to be precise, it's 12% of my income. So, if we assume a standard American 50-hour workweek, I'm paid to play and write about games for six hours a week. (Actually, since the six hours includes the time it takes to write the column in addition to research it by playing the game, the portion of money going towards actual play-time probably works out to more like three hours a week.) I obviously play games way more than that, and I ain't getting any coin for the hours above six a week.
There's an understandable perception that my full-time job is to sit around and play games, but alas, most of my full-time job is researching and writing big feature articles on science and technology for print magazines. My game writing is a sideline.
Mind you, it's pretty sweet to be compensated for any of my time writing about video games! So I'm not complaining about that!
Posted by: Clive![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at September 11, 2007 11:52 AM
Yeah I'd have to second Arrowyn on this one. As long as X Y and Z, there isn't a problem. The issue is, that balance isn't always easy to achieve, gamers seem to find themselves at either extreme.
On the one hand you've got the hardcore WOW player, ignoring their 'real world' friends, skipping work to get home early for horde raids, never leaving the house. I've known gamers where this is reality.
On the other you've got the too-casual reviewer, the gamer who dips into a deep work and then superficially writes it off. Like anything, it's the people who 'hang around' the scene, put time into the experience even when it's not feeling productive or engaging, that ultimately understand the medium more. Maybe it's only in the 21st hour of play where that deep strategy game moves from frustration to flow. Or perhaps the game is terrible, but like a film, you can only credibly dismiss it after experiencing it in full.
Posted by: lukemunn![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at September 11, 2007 6:19 PM
"Like anything, it's the people who 'hang around' the scene, put time into the experience even when it's not feeling productive or engaging, that ultimately understand the medium more."
Yes, I think that's an incredibly interesting point, and cuts to the center of what makes games such a different form of culture from so many other genres. A really good game reveals layers the longer you play. I've often argued that a game review ought to be written in three stages. You do one review after playing the game for about three hours; one review after playing for a couple of days or perhaps a week; and one review after maybe a month or so. A good game often "feels" different at each point, based on one's experience with it ... and really good game criticism would take into account these changes in experience.
Alas, the economics of mainstream publishing are such that there's no money to keep a model like this alive. Indeed, this is why I've argued at various points that the best game writing and reviewing will often and maybe always be done by people from whom it isn't a job. It is the first major form of culture where the best criticism is likely to be nonpro, as it were.
Posted by: Clive![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at September 11, 2007 9:11 PM
Yesterday I saw an interview with Matt Damon (from earlier in the summer) where he said that the films considered for Academy Awards each year should be the ones from 10 years ago. So that this year we would have evaluated and honored performances etc. from 1997. Similar to your idea of review after a period of time has passed and reviewers have a had a deeper experience.
Posted by: Arrowyn![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at September 12, 2007 10:05 AM
Yeah, that's the exact concept. We should probably do the same thing for books ... award "Book of the Year" stuff 25 years hence!
Posted by: Clive![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at September 12, 2007 11:21 AM
I think the effect you mention is unique to videogaming precisely because of the convention you describe: that infernal "time played" timer. And it really is an odd convention, when you think about it.
As gamers, we feel the "opportunity cost" of our sessions so keenly because it is quantified, right there in front of our noses. In actuality the cost is omnipresent, regardless of the medium or nature of the entertainment. It's just not quantified so ruthlessly in most cases.
What other entertainment activities do this, really? Do you have timers on the screen as you're watching a movie in the theatre, a clock HUD on our reading materials as you lose yourself in them, a cumulative timer for a board game you play regularly?
And if we had the option of turning on such a timer, would any of us do it?
The reason for this almost ubiquitous "time played" feature in gaming is ambiguous. In a sense, I think it stems from the days when the quality of a game was assumed to be proportional to the amount of hours it would take to complete it (RPG's were, and still are proponents of this model). Designers offered the feature as a way of quantifying the user's enjoyment of the game.
This evolved into a "badge of honor" mentality among geeks; maxing out the clock became an indicator of your dedication and zeal for the game.
But games are mainstreaming, now. It's assumed to be a casual footnote in the lives of most adults in the current generation, and those adults are getting older. Their opportunity cost is diversifying. The game timer, in this new "kinder gentler...ahem older" gaming paradigm, is starting to shift away from being a badge of honor and is becoming more of a timesink manager.
Posted by: Paul![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.collisiondetection.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at September 27, 2007 1:50 PM