Borrowed Time

In my house, there is always a shelf full of sun-worn cartridges, CD covers that don’t quite close anymore and that have gained that yellowy look that only an aged piece of plastic can achieve.

That shelf has been part of my life since the 80s; over the decades, it has changed its contents (sometimes even itself!), but it is always present. It’s part of me, of my hobbies, of how I value gaming and ownership in general.

Recently, I’ve introduced a Switch 2 and a new set of cartridges. This time not for me, but for my 4-year-old daughter. She started playing with me, and my choice for her first steps was no online accounts, no credit cards, no subscriptions, and no digital products. I would like her to experience gaming the way I experienced it when I was little.

For now, at least, I can childproof her experience. There will be time for her to follow where her friends will be. For now, I prefer a teachable moment about passion and gaming. My goal is to keep all those dark patterns out of the equation for as long as I can. To give her the opportunity to experience something her generation will struggle to have.

This is the reason why this blog and podcast exist.

Who am I?

I am a dad and a husband who has been playing since the 80s. I started with a Commodore 64 and a Game Boy gifted for a couple of festivities aeons ago. I’ve seen almost all generations of consoles. Surely all Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. I played and am playing on PC as well.

I played long enough to remember when buying a game meant something. You paid for it, you took it home, and it was yours. No “licencing”, no server shutdown, nothing like that.

These days, I have a full-time job. I am a manager in the software development industry, and I spent a good chunk of my career in the rooms where dark patterns are created. I have heard many times sentences like “How can we monetise this feature?” or “How can we lower churn at this step?” Most of the time, they were answered in ways that increased conversions or retention, rarely in ways that improved user experience or customer satisfaction.

I know the industry I work in is slightly different, but the psychology and the patterns used to achieve certain goals remain relevant. I am not writing as an outraged passionate gamer (even though it would be a perfectly fine perspective) who despises the practices without knowing what’s behind them and what alternatives exist. I write as someone with firsthand experience on both sides (as a professional and a passionate gamer) and who understands how and why it works so well on people.

The actual complaint

What has been bothering me for a while is how good this industry has become at using psychology against the people who love it. Not in an evil, cartoon-villain way. In a boring, competent way, decided in a meeting and tracked in a spreadsheet.

Achievements designed to make you anxious about completion, not to make you feel good. Games you bought that turn out to be a licence, until the servers are switched off and they’re gone. Hype cycles so aggressive that they burn out the developers and still ship a broken game to us.

None of this is a secret. Most of us kind of know it. But I believe it’s worth naming how it works, instead of just feeling uneasy about it every time we buy something. I’m not asking anyone to boycott anything. I love this hobby and I’m not going anywhere. I’ve just learnt to recognise these patterns thanks to my job, and I can’t unsee them anymore.

Why now, why me

I could have kept complaining at dinner to whoever would listen. Namely my wife and my daughter (poor souls!!). But the real reason this is a blog is simpler: time. Between work and a four-year-old who needs me more than any game does, I play whenever I can steal some minutes. Usually in bed, before sleep.

Having so little time changed how I play more than anything else. When you have forty-five minutes and not a whole evening, you notice very quickly when a game respects your time, and when it’s built to waste it on purpose.

Forza Horizon is a good example. I have a few hundred hours in both 5 and 6. After buying a virtual house (Hotel Castillo in 5, Tokyo City House in 6), logging in every day gives you a super wheelspin, a slot-machine-style reel that gives you credits, cosmetics or cars, with a chance at the special Forza Horizon editions. On top of that, every week there’s a set of goals to win cars, all counting towards a season reward, asking you to repeat the same races, the same style, over and over again for a slightly different car to collect. When I noticed the pattern, I stopped. It stopped being fun and became a chore.

The worst one wasn’t even a game. Xbox daily, weekly and monthly quests: play a Game Pass game, play eight Game Pass games in a month, play on console daily and on PC daily, do your Bing searches. That was a trap I played for too long. I was making sure to have a game running on console and PC for 15 minutes each, sometimes even leaving it idle just for the quest. Then I realised I was playing THAT game, not the games I wanted.

Being busy didn’t make me love games less. It made me lose patience with everything that isn’t the game.

And if you know how something works, you can name it. If you can name it, you can fight it.

What this will and won’t be

There’s plenty of outrage content already, and I don’t want to add to it. I’m not going to review-bomb anyone, and I’m allergic to “games were better when I was a kid”. Mostly because it isn’t true, and partly because it’s boring and too old-generation to say.

What I want to do is point at the specific trick when a game is designed to exploit you instead of entertaining you. Be honest about the distance between the marketing and what actually ships. And be just as loud when something is done right, because a lot of things are. Great art direction, sound that makes you feel something, gameplay that respects the person playing. Those deserve as many words as the critiques, maybe more, because they’re easier to overlook.

There’ll also be space for the practical side: how you keep playing when your evenings belong to someone else first.

Some things are easier to say than to write, so there’s a podcast too. Same ideas, spoken.

Where this leaves us

My daughter will grow up in an industry I don’t fully recognise anymore. Her setup now (cartridges, no accounts, nothing online) is an exception, not what she’ll get when she’s old enough to want what her friends have. I can’t childproof it forever. But I can pay attention, write down what I see, and show her, and anyone reading, that there is another way to play. One that is worth it.