Grown up gaming

I grew up in the countryside, making it difficult to see much of friends in person without pestering my parents for a lift.

I also grew up with a father who worked in the computer industry, got us connected to the internet early and enjoyed the odd game of Wolf 3D, Doom, Command and Conquer, Grand Prix on our monster Pentium Pro PCs. My brother and I even set up a local area network (LAN) at 11 or 12 years old for multiplayer.

For a long time, games were a regular part of my life. From Red Alert to Unreal Tournament, I sunk hours – days – of my time into them, getting up early to play them, staying up late into the night reading about mods on forums.

It was a bit like learning an instrument made of one part technical trouble-shooting, one part lightning fast reactions, another of strategic army-building.

Long story short: I’ve always known this wasn’t necessarily the best use of my time. At University, I abandoned games before Week One to make sure I didn’t miss out on the social element (the academic element was less of a concern.)

But like many gamers, as I grow older, I still want to find a way to reconcile them as a functional part of an adult existence.

Grand plans

For example, strategy games. I currently run my own business and can directly trace some of the habits I have picked up to how I run an empire or battle plan in Civilisation or Command and Conquer.

I even think it’s part of what has given me the appetite to embrace the spreadsheets and planning without fear – the accounts look just like the data you see in those games.

As long as you can treat it with the same abstraction, the rules aren’t that different, you just have to factor in a universe where the developers don’t care about making it fair or satisfying.

So, strategy games stay. I think they’re great exercise for grey matter and potentially a lifelong indulgence, because they don’t depend on reactions.

Not all games have this kind of intellectual stimulation though. What about action games?

Embracing Destiny

I’ve written about this game before for Quartz – it has a relentless, brilliant set of endorphin loops, gently overlapping and combining with the social aspect of playing with friends in a way that makes it compulsive.

It’s the distillation of everything that makes these kinds of game great to me – and maybe that’s why I’ve sunk over 500 hours into it since 2014.

Which is a lot.

However, it turns out that time has come to feel very productive. Because very early on, I combined it with a new habit I could practice at the same time: podcasts.

The gameplay loop of Destiny occupies my lizard-brain and thumbs, while episodes cover everything from the American election to grief, to profiles of important figures, to MBA-level analysis of Silicon Valley in incredible detail.

The cumulative feeling is a kind of white noise. Which sounds absolutely horrible – but is much more relaxing and comforting than watching 90% of TV shows or mediocre movies.

Engaging

Strangely, I’d say the nearest comparison is another love of mine, which I don’t do enough of: reading a good book.

It engages a need for cognitive interactivity of piecing the experience together, as well as that intangible joy that seems to come from building new connections in your brain as you learn about some obscure area of life.

For some reason, it’s in stark contrast to the passive experience of staring at TV without control. And it’s that sense of the alternatives it’s replacing that reassures me of its worth.

Today’s TV is of a higher standard than ever before. But so many are also formulaic, “box set”-shaped, 24 episode marathons with an predictable rise and fall. They chug along, with or without your attention.

Games like Destiny or Rock Band (Pro Drums) have become real hobbies in my life in a way I feel is both relaxing and rewarding.

For the most part, they help me find my compromise toward that old quote: Time you enjoy wasting isn’t wasted time.