The curse of online gaming

I don't know how to write a blog but here's my first post. It will be unprofessional and raw so be aware.

Oh and a little disclaimer that all of the points I've mentioned here are from my own experience and my observations.

The games I've picked for this post are CSGO and Red Dead Redemption 2.

This topic explores on why do we keep sinking hundreds if not thousands of hours on free 2 play online games when we have a whole library full of un-played singleplayer games.

Why on earth do we keep playing same 1 or 2 games that triggers us, leaves us frustrated and angry at times even? So here's why that happens with us 

1.Comfort Zone

This doesn't come as a surprise, Comfort zones have been one of the most limiting things that could ever happen to a person. It keeps us in a bubble, A warm comforting bubble that's safe and cozy, one that doesn't necessarily respect you but sure makes you feel good since you don't have to deal with harsh realities outside of it. It wraps us around like a blanket and with that it keeps us blinded from the outside world. How does one get into a comfort zone for games? you might say it's just a bunch of videogames and you can play anything at any time. But that's far from the truth.

1.1 Rise and Grind

Let's begin this one by saying that competitive games like csgo have a high skill ceiling, you need to sink in hundreds of hours to even start getting used to the weapons in it. We keep practicing and improving with each game and it rewards us with that one flashy kill, with that leaderboard stats and those awesome compliments that our teammates gives us. This is not necessarily a bad thing but this is where most people start getting attached to their game.

1.2 Community of gamers

 By the time you're actually getting good you have made a few in game friends or you might have some classmates who play this and that are your friends now . This creates a social circle around you. And this is where it gets tricky, we treat this social circle of gamers like a community and as we're aware, Humans are very social creatures and have been living in communities/Tribes or cults since the beginning. We love to be a part of a community and feel much safer in it than being an outcast. This creates a unhealthy cycle of playing the game even when you don't really feel like playing, you keep playing because your friends are playing, you can't resist when you see that one friend you always play with start the game and is waiting for you. You just have to play otherwise that person might play without you and you will feel left out/ Missed out on.

1.3 Guilty Pleasure  & Validation

When you're done playing you don't have to necessarily feel great about it but you certainly feel more accepted and safe since you're with all of your buddies who seem to be enjoying this. Now you start thinking of getting better and better but you just keep getting worse after a certain threshold.

You can figure out why on your own, you're now successfully locked into this perpetual cycle of playing the same game in hopes of improving, finding that validation from the "community" and validation from yourself since now you're somehow a worse player than your past self.

2.Lack of Attention span

So you just finished your game and now you're browsing twitter or whatever social media platform of your choice, and then you see a trailer for red dead redemption 2 and quickly see that it's been trending #1 on the platform but you couldn't get yourself to be hyped for it. You did felt a slight amount of excitement seeing all the graphics, beautiful open worlds and amazing action sequences shown. You go ahead and buy the game for yourself since you're a "gamer" and you want to play all those games that are hyped and popular. So you load up the game and a cutscene loads up. you're waiting patiently for the cutscene to finish so you can finally control your character and put yourself in that massive beautiful open world. Then you're just hit with a boring gameplay where it feels like you're playing a walking simulator in a snow storm. you play for 20 mins and then you see your friend inviting you for your favorite online game and you quickly give up this game and hop over to that one.

2.1 Visual Stimuli 

This is so common with people today, at every step we're looking for that fun and excitement factors in the media we're consuming weather it be games. movies or TV shows. And guess what? the online games provides us just that with a lot of flashy things happening on screen like shooting people's heads off or throwing grenades that cause massive explosions and you see a pop up saying TRIPLE KILL.

2.2 Vicious cycle

Quickly immerse yourself in the same old battlefield kill, die. respawn in few secs and do it again for next few hours. And when we're matchmaking we quickly grab our phones and start scrolling on social media or we're engaging in chats with your teammates. we're constantly feeding our brains with something to consume and be excited about. we're constantly chipping off our ability to be patient and less distracted.

I've seen people who start scrolling as soon as they die, so you don't have to wait 10 more seconds thinking about your life and how miserable it is getting with each day. It is a truly vicious cycle until you're drained completely.

2.3 Audio stimuli

Then there's people who listen to music of their choice while playing these games, it definitely keeps the brain occupied with things that tickles it the right way. I've been in this position multiple times and it takes the idea of casual gaming to the next level to the point where you're the most hated guy in the lobby for not communicating, not listening to sounds in game and being a mindless goon in the game.

How does this relate to Single-player games? well most AAA or even indie games have a their stories more meticulously crafted. This includes the sound design, music direction and the environment, that starting sequence of red dead redemption 2 sure is slow paced and this alone might scare you off but when you see there's not a lot going on in the environment around you except snowstorm it really puts you off.

3.Gaming Content

We all have that one player who we look forward to or that one thing that we really wanna get good at, so we head on to youtube for tutorials or go to that twitch livestream to learn more.

3.1 Ecosystem & Content monoculture  Ecosystem & Content monoculture 

When we start looking for such videos on youtube we start getting more recommendations of them, the more we watch the more it gets recommended. That's how the youtube algorithm works, it feeds you the content you watch the most. This is one way to surround your digital space outside of gaming with the same game with all the topics floating around about that game. This is where we get sucked into the content rabbithole where we start enjoying the cool tricks that these streamers or pros do or just how good these people are in the games they love, We become addicted to watching these videos since they're doing something remarkable in the game you've been playing for ages now.

This not only blinds us from what's happening with other games or the game that you bought, which one was it? Oh Red dead redemption 2 ( I'll start calling it RDR 2 since it's getting really long with that name ) So within 2 days after you bought that game all the hype seemingly dropped for you, you no longer care to complete the first mission let alone the whole game which might take 100 hours. You just go back to your online game and start practicing the moves you just saw in the youtube video. This is exciting isn't it ? who needs to walk into the snow for an hour just to complete intro mission when you could do some cool tricks that can get a lot of reaction from your game community. Sounds really fun and validating if I pull that one off...

3.2 Cultural phenomenon & entertainment

The youtube tutorials and streamers we watch ascends to new heights, now we're sharing these videos with our fellow gamers in the community, we get to hear other's thoughts and opinions on it and it becomes a topic of conversation and so on. We start treating this like a sport or a culture. 

And we know how it is with sports when you're invested heavily into one sport let's say in soccer you don't really wanna switch over to baseball or tennis. you've been playing soccer for far too long and you've made far too many friends now to switch this. And hey it's not that bad but also not exciting and fun as it used to...

This leads us back to one of our previous points of comfort zone. We really don't switch our grounds no matter how appealing the thing next to us is.

Conclusion

We miss out on a lot of things outside of our little bubble we've formed. We turn gaming from something fun, exciting and new every time we pick up a new game, to this unholy cycle of pure insecurity, lack of confidence to try something new and worst of all lack of attention span.