It’s time for another round of pointless self reflection, and you get to play along at home! First, let’s establish the pattern:

I’ll start playing a new (to me) live service game for some reason. Maybe it’s all the rage, or maybe it’s on Game Pass or something. At first I’m just kind of poking at it. No plan, no optimization, no spreadsheets open on the second monitor, just running around seeing what happens and thinking, “Huh. This is actually pretty good.” I’m having fun. I’m not committed to anything. I’m not trying to be efficient. I’m just playing.

So I play for a day or three, and at some point I get a pop-up telling me I earned a Daily Login Reward or I advanced the Battle Pass.

Now, I didn’t ask for a Battle Pass. I was just over here having fun playing. But fine, free stuff is free stuff. I should at least see what I can earn, right? And next thing I know I’m not just playing the game, I’m studying the reward track like I’m planning retirement contributions. If I do this and that and the other thing I’ll have enough points to unlock the next freebie and keep my streak alive.

How I turn every live service game into a chore

It’s subtle. I don’t even notice it happening. I’m still having fun. But now I have a plan. Dare I say, a schedule. A checklist. I log in every day and first thing I do is finish my dailies, push the Battle Pass forward, collect the daily rewards. This is fine; I’m in that honeymoon period and I was going to play anyway.

The absolute worst version of this, though, is when I’m already logging in every day anyway and I decide that since I’m clearly committed, it makes perfect sense to spend money on the Premium Battle Pass. Or one of those daily login reward subscriptions where they basically give you a little allowance as long as you show up and punch the clock. The latter are so low effort: you literally log in and you get your rewards. You’ve paid for 30 days. The catch is, if you miss a day, you miss that day’s rewards. So you best log in EVERY DAY.

And once I’ve spent actual dollars, that’s it. I’m no longer just playing a game. I HAVE to log in now. I paid for this. I would be irresponsible not to extract maximum value from my purchase.

And that’s when the fun quietly starts packing its bags.

Story? I’ll worry about that later

The thing is, nothing dramatic happens. There isn’t some big moment where I slam the keyboard and declare the game ruined. It’s much quieter than that. I just start noticing that I’m logging in even on nights when I don’t really feel like it. Not because I’m excited to see what happens next, but because there’s a checklist waiting for me.

“Just knock out the dailies real quick.”

That’s the phrase. The phrase of doom.

I tell myself it’ll only take ten minutes. Fifteen, tops. I’ll grab the login reward, clear whatever daily tasks are being repeated today, maybe collect some currency that resets at midnight, and then I can decide if I actually want to play.

Except by the time I’ve done all that, it hasn’t been 15 minutes, it’s been 30-45 because somewhere, something went a little bit amiss. And when the checklist is finished, so am I. I’ve harvested the crops, killed the required number of enemies, cleared the little red exclamation points on various sub-menus and options, and now the idea of “real” play feels like overtime.

Now presumably, since I am a very narrative focused gamer, part of what drew me to this game in the first place is the storyline. But now I’m never touching the storyline. I’m just doing the daily tasks, the time-limited tasks, all the things I ‘should’ do so that I don’t miss out. And the game has become another chore to do every day. Almost a job. I’m logging in to collect virtual currency, NOT to have fun, not to enjoy an interesting story. And as more and more content rolls out I fall farther and farther behind and now I don’t even engage with the community for fear of spoilers since I’m back in the starter zone collecting 10 flowers every day and killing that same boss every night.

Just another obligation

The worst part is that none of what I’m asked to do is hard. It’s not even really unpleasant. It just feels… obligatory. Boring, even. Like taking out the trash. You don’t hate taking out the trash. You just don’t feel a surge of joy about it either. You do it because it needs to be done.

Somewhere in there the game quietly stops being the thing I choose and starts being the thing I maintain.

That’s the beginning of the end. Actually, not true. By this point we’re like mid-way through the end. I’m starting to resent the game more than anything. It’s 10 pm and I want to play the game I WANT to play but instead I’m logging into the live service albatross to check that off my list.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results

Now here’s the part where I pretend I’m surprised by any of this.

Because this is not new behavior. This is a pattern. I have done this before. I will do this again. If there were a Battle Pass for learning from my mistakes, I would absolutely grind it out and still not unlock the lesson.

I always act like this time will be different. This time I’ll just enjoy the game. This time I won’t care about the streak. This time I won’t let the daily reset timer dictate my evening plans like some tiny digital landlord. This time, dammit, I will JUST focus on the story and leave that other stuff for “endgame” once I’ve unlocked all the zones and defeated the big bad at the end of the tale.

And yet.

There’s something in my brain that just hates missing out on stuff. If the game offers me a reward for logging in seven days in a row, well now I have GOT to get that reward because I’m sure it’ll change the game completely for me. [Spoiler: It never does.]

And then there’s the money part. Once I’ve paid for the Premium Battle Pass I’m REALLY committed. I start calculating value per day. If I miss a login, I’ve wasted fifty cents. If I don’t finish the season track, I’ve basically set fire to five dollars. This is how my brain works, and I wish I were exaggerating.

The game didn’t do that to me. I did that to me. I could simply… not. I could skip a day. The sun would still rise. My characters would still be there. The digital crops would not file a complaint. Yes, I’d lose out on 50 cents worth of digital currency but so what? It’s 50 cents. It should’t matter.

And yet I log in.

What I SHOULD be doing

When I think about the games I’ve loved the most, the ones that stuck with me long after I stopped playing them, none of them are tied to a streak. I don’t remember what day I logged in. I don’t remember what tier of the Battle Pass I hit. I remember wandering. I remember the story. I remember the characters. I remember rushing through boring bits and really meandering through parts I loved.

I remember deciding to go left instead of right just because the light looked interesting over there. I remember getting distracted halfway through a quest because something shiny caught my eye. I remember staying up too late not because something was about to expire at midnight, but because I wanted to see what was over the next hill.

That’s my happy place in games. The roaming. The poking around. The completely inefficient use of time. I AM the worlds slowest gamer and for good reason. If HowLongToBeat says it’ll take 50 hours to complete a game, I’m going to take 100 hours. I just HATE rushing.

When I’m wandering, I’m not optimizing. I’m not thinking about value extraction or daily caps or whether I’ve “maximized rewards.” I’m just in the space. If I don’t log in tomorrow, nothing breaks. The world doesn’t reset on me. It just waits. Maybe I take a bite of story. Maybe I don’t. Maybe I go see if I can get over that mountain. Or what happens if I swim too far out to sea. Will I die from slaughterfish or will I just get teleported back to land. Let’s find out!

That’s probably why life sims and slower games have been pulling me in lately. There’s no clock ticking in the background saying, “Better hurry up, this offer ends soon.” I can roam around, talk to whoever I feel like talking to, maybe dazzle someone with fireworks and go in for the hug, and call it a night. [Sorry, day dreaming about my Sandrock wife Amirah… she’s so attentive!]

And maybe that’s the real difference. Wandering is open-ended. It doesn’t demand anything from me. It doesn’t care if I show up every single day. It doesn’t punish me for having other things to do. It just exists, waiting for when I feel like stepping back into it.

Daily logins, on the other hand, always feel like they’re tapping their watch.

And I’m starting to think that as soon as a game starts tapping its watch at me, I should probably take that as a cue to wander off somewhere else.