A socratic dialogue on wasting time
Last year I was playing Cyberpunk 2077, and realized like 80 or 90 hours in that it wasn’t fun, and I didn’t really like it. Why did it take me so long to realize that? Was I having fun earlier in the game? I noticed that I was just doing in game busy-work, going to every Point-of-Interest and dutifully performing all of these little bullshit tasks, and not enjoying them at all. It was like homework, I would even put on podcasts while I did it. Its one thing to do that while playing deathmatch in Counter-Strike, but it seems downright weird while playing a singleplayer RPG. My first instinct was that game was disrespecting me, disrespecting my time with these trite missions, so I decided “fuck this lets just follow the game’s main questlines and complete them, I’m not clearing any more outposts”. And the game was done in like 4-5 hours, and the conclusion left me feeling cold. Then I found myself sort of puzzled, why had I spent all that time doing that? That wasn’t even fun! It didn’t even pay off in a satisfying way.
I eventually shrugged that feeling off, writing it off as a bad game, and really that it was just the consequences of insulting fetch-quest design, which I have since sworn off of letting myself do in video games, for the most part. That is, until I started actually reflecting on the games I was playing and what I was doing in them.
CS2, Elden Ring, TW3, Risk of Rain 2 and Helldivers 2 together make up about 74% of my time playing games in 2024. 4 of these games didn’t even come out in 2024, and the one that did was the least played of those (Helldivers 2 with only 7%). I already had like 2000 hours in Counter-Strike, probably around 150 or so in Elden Ring, similar in TW3, and so on. Most of the games I played the most in 2024 were games I was already deeply familiar with. This provokes a lot of questions in me. The first is, what was I actually feeling as I played those games? What was the qualia of my 20th hour in RoR2? I thought I played video games for fun, for escapism, for something really enjoyable, but I don’t really find that as I take inventory of that time. There were certainly moments, I enjoyed HD2 a lot when it came out, had a real Elden Ring obsessive moment when I was only reading lore about the world and loving the DLC, and CS2 is mostly an excuse to do something with my friends. But I can’t imagine that those feelings formed the majority of those experiences, lord knows I’ve been miserable playing Counter-Strike, and just mentally absent while playing TW3.
To me it seems clear that most of my time spent playing games that aren’t multiplayer (HD2 isn’t innocent of this though) is a form of distraction and busywork. I’m puttering around in my own digital world, maybe finding some enjoyment in the mechanics, and even more rarely the story. More often what happens is I have a sort of headcanon going, framing and telling my own story to only myself, which honestly is the only explanation for my playing Bannerlord and even TW3. It’s a little baffling, and worrying that often times I’m excited to hurry up and do nothing.
But isn’t that leisure time? It seems like it, a sort of pleasurable disconnect from any worldly concerns and “turning off your brain”. For the moment lets discard the fact that no part of my life is significantly stressful or difficult enough to really justify extended periods of “leisure”. Lets say I deserve a time of leisure, then is a video game, in the fashion I’ve laid about above, a good way to satisfy that? In theory, yeah, I’m escaping my normal life and embodying something else, and being good at that thing. But when I interrogate this further, I don’t think that’s what I’m doing when I play video games. I’m mostly just checking off boxes, fulfilling objectives. What I think this actually does, for me, is give me a sense of accomplishment, or fulfillment. Those discarded facts of my general lack of hard work have suddenly come crashing back in through the skylight. Maybe this is just a symptom of my general alienation, and sense of unfulfillment, which as I write this feels instinctually correct. I feel like I’m building something when I conquer the 18th province in TW3, or get another 12 medals in HD2.
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What is all of this to say? I only play video games to turn my brain off for a while. This isn’t exactly a huge revelation, lots of people do this with all sorts of media, but I think it kinda breaks the illusion I had with video games. I told myself I spent so much time on these games because they were fun, because I enjoyed playing them, when it was really something else, it was just completing tasks. This is beginning to sound eerily similar to Am I Having A Good Day?
When I was a kid, I used to “play”. For me, this involved taking my nerf gun with me outside, or downstairs, and running around making shooting noises, envisaging myself as a part of some narrative, normally ripped from the video game trailers I would watch when my parents weren’t looking. When I was really in the zone, I distinctly remember this as fun, satisfying, and even tiring. I would try and try again to get myself into the right imaginary space to act out these narratives of heroism and violence, only known to me, and anyone looking into my backyard and seeing that weird kid with the sword again. As I got older, I think part of me expected video games to be mostly the same, but despite all their interactivity, I don’t think they’ve ever been as engrossing and engaging as those moments of play. It wasn’t really leisure time, it was a very active and focused, and even stressful thing. Video games are no longer “play” for me, they are work and fulfillment displaced.
So what do I do with that? Should I still play video games? Is there something fundamentally wrong with completing tasks in a virtual world, especially if that didn’t necessarily impede success in the “real” world? That doesn’t seem certain to me, but I’m still struggling to find what that balance would be like, how do I monitor that experience so I’m not just checking off boxes again? More pressing to me, is what should replace “play”, if anything? Should I write stories? Should I play DnD more? Should I dig through old storage containers and find my nerf guns?
Also, have I just taken it as granted that there are no “fun” video games? I don’t think this is true, but I have to admit, it has been a long time since a game has made me feel as enthralled as If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, or Time Out of Mind, or even Bloodborne once upon a time. Maybe I’m too close minded and there are lots of enthralling video games out there, but I’m just too addicted to the slop. I felt all of these feelings, and bought Path of Exile 2 anyways, and boy that game is some cognitohazard level slop.
I think for the time being, I am glad that I am least recognizing games for what they have been to me. Success and accomplishment simulators, that often stand in for something else, but thankfully I’m starting to expand my horizons. I learned how to read again, I wrote this, I’ve started painting miniatures, I love music. I think in a good life there is still room for the video game in the form I’ve recognized, but I can’t put it on a pedestal as one of my favourite ways to spend my time. It’s not play at the moment. I got a lot of other things to realize and learn. I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve figured this out and this is the final word from me on this though. There is a lot going on here as well that’s hard to disentangle, my feelings about work, my self esteem, something like impostor syndrome, my introversion/extroversion, my time spent looking at social media, a lot plays into it that I can’t have fully described here.
Oh well, I’ve gotta go play some Helldivers.