I don’t replay games fairly often. That's not by choice, there are more than a few games I would love to revisit, whether they’re ones I beat fairly recently or ones I loved when I was younger, but I never really get around to replaying... just about any of the games I want to replay. Instead I wind up feeling like I don't have the time, or that my time would be better suited playing something new that I've been meaning to play, only to fail to get around to those, either.

It's not for lack of time, - especially with how this past year has been - but for some reason, I frequently have moments where I will put dozens of hours into a single game in the course of a week, ignoring games I should rather or sometimes would rather play. I've had moments like this with a number of games, at this point I basically do it once a year with Terraria, but lately I've been noticing it happening with two categories of game in specific. Well, perhaps "lately" is a bit of a misrepresentation, both are by no means new categories, nor am I new to spending this sort of time with them, but my more recent waves of playtime certainly count as "lately". Specifically, this past year I've found myself putting increasing time into roguelikes and free-to-play games, even after I've stopped necessarily having fun with the time I've put into them.

The Berlin Conundrum

Roguelikes have always been an especially sore point for me, in some ways. I suppose it's sort of endemic to the design of the genre, but with almost every roguelike I try, I find I either try again and again to get into a roguelike, only to put two-to-five hours into it before putting it down, or I wind up fifty, sixty, one hundred hours into it before being torn away by another game, or forcibly tearing myself away by uninstalling it. Hell, the fact that I reached the credits of Hades in around 35 hours felt brisk to me, and that Hades is built in such a way that I could put in that 35 hours and feel content in putting it down after was part of why it was one of my favorite games of last year, certainly one of my favorite roguelikes of all time. But simply "concluding" in a semi-reasonable time-frame isn't the only reason I felt content after that time with Hades; a large part of it was because when Hades reaches credits, it feels like something has been accomplished, a feeling that's all too vacant from the majority of roguelikes.

It's a genre that prides itself on that sort of idea, "winning is only the beginning", which is part of why I took to roguelikes in the first place. The prospect of lightweight games with "infinite replayability" appealed to the weak PC and limited budget I used to have, especially when paired with the tight gameplay mechanics these sorts of games tend to have. Yet thinking back, I struggle to remember a roguelike where beating a run truly felt like a satisfying conclusion (Rogue Legacy, maybe, due to how it builds upon previous runs, FTL simply for what a nightmare that final boss is). At the time, this was barely an issue in my mind, after all "winning is only the beginning", and I was less precious about how and why my time got spent. This also coincided with a time in my life when I was diehard about the idea of "100%ing" games (although I suppose that's a topic for another time), so I was completely fine with playing a game until I either found something else or had every achievement.

But nowadays, I find myself in a weird position when a roguelike ends unceremoniously with a pat on the back and a "now do it again". The options are fairly simple, call that the end and move onto another game, or keep playing until I reach some other stopping point. A ridiculously simple choice, or so I thought, until the option presented itself recently with Unexplored, a game rooted firmly in mechanics from the original Rogue, albeit with achievement-tied progression mechanics, and one which I really enjoyed for most of my time with it, at least until I found myself spending entire days grinding out achievements to get the last ~20 or so still to go. Maybe it's temporary burnout, but now, on the other side of the ordeal, I find myself completely turned off from the idea of playing any more Unexplored, or any roguelike in general really, at least for the time being. That isn't to single that game out as the only case of this, however. I went through the same motions with both Binding of Isaacs, Spelunky, Enter the Gungeon (although I didn't get as far as to get all achievements in EtG), the list goes on. For some reason, for lack of a more conclusive ending, I wind up struggling to put most roguelikes down until I've either "done it all", or I've burned out on them, assuming the two don't go hand-in-hand.

Cutting Off My Time to Spite My Monetization

The other side of this equation is free-to-play games - or rather, I suppose, f2p games with heavy monetization schemes, the kind of which is becoming all too common these days. I haven't been playing these types of games quite as long, or at least I haven't been engaging with them quite in the same way as I find myself doing nowadays. I frequently perused the free and demo sections of Steam when I first made my account back in 2010, playing a number of games that probably didn't deserve the time I gave them (MicroVolts, anyone?), although I usually ignored these game's monetization schemes, or at most I used a bit of leftover Steam wallet cash to buy an item or two. But the way I thought about these games, and my desire to play them, would always revolve around whether I was continuing to enjoy the game or not, more than anything else.

That approach isn't so simple these days. It probably never was, and I was just too young and naive to pay microtransactions much mind, but now amid an increasingly inescapable landscape of skins, cosmetics, voice lines, and any other aspect of a game that can be profited from, I've come to view them from a perspective of... spite, I suppose. It all began with Pokémon Picross, a game which released right around the time I first got obsessed with picross puzzles. I excitedly downloaded it soon after it came out, only to find that it was monetized to hell and back, with even filling individual tiles being tied to a monetized stamina system. I could, and probably should, have uninstalled it and written it off as a disappointing loss, but instead I got it in my head that I was going to plow through and "beat the system", by finishing the game without paying a cent. It was a Pyrrhic victory, as I succeeded after nearly a year's worth of daily challenge puzzles, but I stubbornly kept going even as I began to realize how little fun I was having when picross was combined with Pokémon abilities that nullify the puzzle aspect and a monetization scheme that actively impedes the puzzle aspect.

At the time, Pokémon Picross was a one-off case, it wouldn't be until the past few years that I really started to fall into this mindset of trying to "get one over" on heavily monetized games, starting with everyone's favorite, Fortnite Battle Royale. It's a game I don't even particularly like, with shooting that is less excitement and more a split-second roll of the dice, and matchmaking which takes no steps to mitigate the ridiculous skill gap between a seasoned player and one who just installed the game, but it's also a game I felt compelled to understand, and one which some part of me felt I could enjoy, if only I got a bit better at it. A long and circuitous path led me to play nearly 200 hours of the game, through a mix of desire for at least a consistent skin, sunk cost fallacy from buying underwhelming battle passes with hard-earned free v-bucks, and some of the longest Summer days of my life. I eventually wised up due to a particularly bad battle pass, and wound up uninstalling the game, but found myself nearly falling into the exact same pitfall with Mahjong Soul just this past Winter. It wasn't until I realized just how much time I was spending "gaming the system" and just how little I cared for the rewards that I truly realized what a tiny part of me always knew, that this was the intended effect for these games to have, whether a player is willing to spend money or not.

So What's It All For?

Addiction is a strong word. Like, a very, very strong word. When I was younger, I always found the idea of "video game addiction" ridiculous, even if it did always strike me as a little weird when games were praised for their "addictive gameplay" and people would casually talk about spending fourteen hours playing a single game without getting up from their seat. ADHD does lend itself to addictive personalities, which I suppose could explain the mass amounts of time I've put into some of these games, or maybe it's just the age-old case of it being easier to play something familiar and casual than playing something exciting and unknown. Do I think it's reasonable to call these week-long bursts of video game binges an addiction? I... don't know, like I said, it's a very strong word. But it's one that my mind keeps coming back to the more I think about all this. It's undeniably a word central to the design of some of these games, whether they would admit it or not, and as much as I would like to think I'm above falling for cheap manipulation tactics in games, my time with Fortnite served primarily as a lesson that I'm absolutely not.

As it currently stands, I've uninstalled a lot of the games I've mentioned here, and I don't plan on reinstalling them, at least not soon. Will I fall into this pattern some time again in the future? I don't know. Hopefully not, but you never can know. For now at least, I'm looking forward to having a free moment to play something new.