And here I am having lost the wonder and excitement of gaming trying to spend any time playing a game rather than staring at the millions of backlogged titles.
The author talks a lot about the addictiveness of the flow state, and how most players try to achieve thjs state to just stop thinking for a while. I found it interesting what the author said about the teacher trying to get their students to recognize the feeling of games, because that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do lately to counteract that state of not really taking things in and just passing through the game.
There’s a youtuber named “Any Austin” who really opened my eyes up to this. Now instead of doing the quests and advancing the game, I take my time with games. I actively get annoyed when games don’t give me some quiet time to not play the game, and I really appreciate the beauty of games beyind the gameplay.
I highly recommend everyone to try this out: pick your favourite game, preferably one with an actual game world you can move around in, rather than just a board like balatro, and just sit. Don’t play the game, just find something interesting and stare at it. Think about how it was made, and what purpose does it serve in the game. Keep doing this, just walk around your world and try to appreciate its existence. Stare at the skybox, the grass, the buildings, the mountains.
This has given me both a new appreciation for games, and a way to break free from the endless treadmill of going from one experience to the next, with no thought put into the inbetween. It’s a sort of mindfulness in a way, and something I feel has actively improved my real life rather than just distracted me from it. Now I find myself able to appreciate these small beauties and curiosities everywhere I go.
One of the things I regret the most during my gamer life was speeding up Red Dead Redemption 2. From chapter 3 onward I ignored most of the side missions and small interactions. I tried to do the main missions as fast as I could. In the end I felt like I lost the core experience. Someday I’ll try to finish it more slowly
Big agree on all of that, including the Any Austin recommendation!
Skyrim is amazing for this kind of mindfulness with its environments. The NPCs are a little so-so (once you spend an extended amount of time at the same location) but you can’t go wrong with setting up campfire and just taking in the wilderness and everything around you. X4 Foundations actually is pretty great, too, for this vibe-intake, when you land on a station and just exist (or sneak into another captain’s ship and see where it takes you)
The exploration is part of why I love Snowrunner (et al.) so much. You do end up spending a lot of time slowly working your way through mud, looking for anchor points and easier routes. It feels kinda like an “adventure metroidvania” where the challenge is learning how to navigate the world before giving you the tools to blast through.
I recommend disabling any minimap in any game ever. Little dotted line syndrome is real and harms immersion!
Also hard rec for Any Austin, one of my favorite recent discoveries!
Love a new youtube rec.
This is a really cool idea though. I’m actually playing F.I.S.T. right now and I’ve absentmindedly noticed some neat details in the environment backgrounds. Might slow myself down to a stroll in one of the city areas and take a closer look.
Been thinking about this type of thing a lot, especially as my older child is reaching an age where his friends are being allowed to play things like Roblox. Finding myself needing to explain gambling-adjacent risks, design patterns intended to capture rather than entertain or delight, and general digital citizenship.
Because he doesn’t have a ton of experience, I think he finds it unnatural to believe people like game makers might act deceptively or even maliciously. And I imagine he’s skeptical that his attention could even be manipulated the way games try.
Even “educational” games like Prodigy, endorsed by and used in his school, are lousy with operant conditioning and flow state design (and by some credible accounts are not even educationally valuable). I drew a line immediately against spending money within games and he’s so far been accepting of it. But the temptation is all over the place.
