I’m buzzing a bit on dopamine from the last few hours of this game, so this is my disclaimer of that. I could be full of it, as far as this particular mindset of mine working. Dopamine makes you think you have good ideas, and some times you don’t. That’s what makes one manic, excess dopamine, all the ideas seem like good ones. The reason it’s such a dark dive…. is that many ideas aren’t good, and unfortunately our brains use chemicals to signal that.
Seriously, it’s kind of screwed up that humans spend so much time fiddling with their dopamine and seratonin levels…. but that’s another discussion.
Something about how my brain works; metaphors often seem really insightful. This is about one of those, and I’m not sure, maybe it is insightful.
So about this game. I feel like half the people reading suddenly were turned off. Oh well. I’d like to not be alone with my thoughts, but I feel a strong need to unpack this.
The game is Space Engineers, and the thing is that it has sat in my game library for years. I was going to be specific, but that apparently isn’t a statistic anyone tracks. It’s been out ten years, I bougtht it more than three ago. The thing that is different is I remember playing it back when I bought it, I did some of the tutorial levels and just felt “eh”.
The reason I’m even playing it is that several of my other devs of games I care about either really screwed up, or aren’t challenging me enough because it isn’t part of their design. I’ve played hundreds of hours of Dyson Sphere Program, Timberborn and Satisfactory, to the point that I’m not that excited anymore to play. It isn’t the dev’s fault, few games hold up after more than 200 hours.
But Microsoft and whomever is responsible for Ark both REALLY screwed up. Microsoft bought Minecraft, which is provisionally developed by a company called Mojang. But it’s Microsoft, which usually is a pretty forgiving overlord as far as a mega company goes…. not this time. They put out a statement that if they don’t like the way you’re playing the game, they’ll get your content taken down. Literally, that broad, that arbitrary, that disrespectful. Ark….. I can’t even with that dev right now. Great concept, and at some points a great game……. horrible dev. The dev hates their community, and it’s really weird to run into that.
I had thousands of hours in those two games though. They both challenged me and gave me something to push back on….. but now I don’t want to put my experience into the hands of these devs, so I had to find something new to play.
God, this is a page long already. God bless you if you’re still reading. Or Cthulu bless you, whomever you’d accept a blessing from.
Anyway, I’m about a week and a half in right now. 40ish hours. The first 25 were painful, but somehow in a way that I found profound. The game is about building bases and ships and exploring a huge world. My first three ships exploded. Partially pilot error, partially not knowing what I was doing. So because I found the experience somehow kept me coming back, which might just be sunk cost fallacy, I kept pushing until I started to do okay…… and my god the dopamine when that hit. 25 hours of well spent frustration.
and I thought I would keep the same frustration tolerance I had for the first few dozen hours. When stuff blew up, I either started fresh or restored a save before it blew up. In this game, it’s possible to go back and correct mistakes. That’s what is profound about it, to me.
but then something happened today. I had a partial game issue and I pushed through. I pushed through because my ship was full of ore, so even though I was down 2-3 engines, I figured out that I could fly my ship upside down back to base….. and so I did. I managed to park the stupid thing, damaged, and drain the ore into my base.
and staring at it, thinking about how week ago me would have given up, I thought maybe I’ve found something. Maybe that’s where I am. I want to find something to start that is rewarding enough I’ll push through the crashes, that I’ll salvage my progres and keep moving forward.
That it would be worth it to do absurd solutions like flying back to base upside down, and parking that way.
Like I said, it might be the huge dopamine hit I get from surviving stuff like that….. from meeting with nearly no resistance apart from physics…. but sometimes the physics kicks my butt.
Maybe it’s just a good game. Maybe there still is no ladder out of the pit of despair that is my real life and career. But I’ve dissacciated for 40+ hours, and when I was doing it, I felt better and more alive than I have in months. Fantastic destraction, I think that’s an objective fact.
1 comment
That’s cool you found a game that resonates with you. I typically don’t play those extensive Sim games or ones that don’t catch me in the first five hours or so. That’s an interesting thing. Finding something that’s worth pushing past the failures because it’s so satisfying to succeed. Hope we can both find that in our everyday lives. Who knows? Hope this high you’re feeling lasts. So long as it doesn’t escalate to full blown mania. Hope life starts treating you well Viking.