How Some Games Trick You Into Wasting Your Time (And How To Avoid It)

As a gamer, it can be very easy to sink countless hours into a game that really has its teeth in you. When a game is just that good, the experience can be well worth the time you put into it, even if your playtime is a little embarrassing to share after the fact. However, there are games that can get you spending just as much time in them, only, you might not be having as much fun as you might otherwise. 

You may think it’s as simple as “if you’re not having fun, just play something else” but the industry has developed a whole host of tricks to effectively waste gamer time. Here are a few of them, and what you can do to avoid them.

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The Trick Of Inertia

It’s a very common cycle, one that many gamers will have fallen into at one point in their life. A new game comes out, you play it, you love it, and you start investing a lot of time into it, as it changes over time. However, with time, those changes make the experience less fun, or you find you’re getting less out of it compared to what you used to until you’re no longer playing it because you find it particularly fun, but because it’s simply your habit. 

This stagnation is a big part of the reason many gamers fell out of love with Overwatch, but it can apply to almost any online or live-service game. Having that moment of “realization” is an important step for moving on, so ask yourself, does it sound familiar to any of the games you’re playing right now?

Padding With The Grind

There are a lot of games where grinding is built into a natural part of the experience. Character growth and unlocking new strategies is a major part of the appeal of roleplaying games, for instance, so many fans tend to enjoy well-balanced grinds. In other games, however, such as online shooting games, grinding has seemingly been added as a means to do nothing other than keep you playing for longer, always dangling the carrot of the loadout or aesthetic you want in front of you. However, in a lot of cases, this doesn’t add any value to the game itself and, in fact, can greatly detract from it. 

Skipping the grind is an option, thankfully. Nowadays, there are modded account services available that you can buy for most online games to immediately unlock the options available to you in those games. If you’re not willing to do that, however, consider how much time you’re really willing to put into each game

Open-World Bloat

One of the design philosophies that has become over-abundant, as of late, is the incorporation of open worlds. Once upon a time, these were sort of a holy grail for games, an indicator of massive levels of choice, and a freedom of exploration that few games offered. Nowadays, however, the reality is that most of them are full of fetch quests and trivial activities that you can get sucked into.

Once you start playing an open-world game, the “sunk cost fallacy” can make you feel like you have to tick every item off the map and explore every nook and cranny of the game, which can quickly begin to drain your enthusiasm to play it. Try to ignore those completionist urges to enjoy the parts of the game that engage you the most.

Gacha Mechanics

One insidious game design element that has been becoming more and more popular is the “gacha” system. Randomize loot boxes, drops, and pulls can get you spending a lot of time and money on effectively gambling to get the rewards that you truly want, instead of the junk that’s a lot more common.

There are a lot of gacha games that offer a speed onboarding process, loading you with free items, characters, and unlocks that can make it seem like progression is easy and fast until you hit the point where those rewards suddenly drop off. At that point, the game is trying to incentivize you to repeat the feelings of achievement you had earlier, but at a cost to yourself. It’s a good idea to research these systems and avoid them whenever games look like they have them.

With the tips above, hopefully, you should be able to spot when games are being exploitative or manipulative, or even when your time playing them has come to its natural conclusion. Whether you’re able to find the fun in those games again, or simply jump over to something else, it’s always worth taking the time to break out of the quasi-mind control that modern games can put on us.