I Stopped Playing Video Games That Don't Respect My Time (You Should Too)

Have you ever found yourself spending 100 hours on a game without ever getting to the actual content? Games that are all about the grind can feel like a waste of time, especially when there are so many other games you could be playing instead. Here's how I learned to spot them early so that I can avoid them.

If, like me, you have an extensive backlog of games, it's especially frustrating to run into a game that doesn't respect the time you put into it. I've been cutting down my backlog efficiently, but a few outliers still drive me nuts. I've made it my personal mission to avoid buying and playing those games.

I'm sure you've encountered some of these time-sink mechanics. These can add hours of gameplay without actually adding anything of worth to the experience. I'm talking pointless fetch quests, limited-energy systems, daily logins, and grinding for ultra-rare loot. They can all feel like time-wasters, and I'm done with them.

If I Like Playing the Game, What's The Big Deal, Anyway?

You might enjoy logging into Destiny 2 or Genshin Impact and playing the game every day. Enjoyment should be the primary driver of why you want to boot it up and play in the first place. But it's important to ask yourself: do you actually like the game, or are you being conditioned to like the game? The modern gaming industry relies heavily on psychological conditioning to get players hooked on their games.

One of the psychological tools used in game design nowadays is the "Skinner Box." B.F. Skinner designed this experiment as a student at Harvard, in which animals were taught to respond to light and sound stimuli, receiving a treat when they performed admirably. He learned that if you train animals properly, you can get them to do what you want them to.

Game designers have incorporated Skinner Boxes into their development systems. Now, when you log into Clash of Clans every day, you get a reward. The reward keeps increasing until you've logged in for a week, and you don't want to break your streak, right? That's a Skinner Box.

They're prevalent in free-to-play games to get players to come back and purchase in-game items. It also preys on a player's fear of missing out, or FOMO.

Skinner boxes are just one of the ways that games waste your time by offering a rush of dopamine for performing a task. But this is far from the only insidious way that games manipulate you into wasting your time on them.

Let's say you're playing a non-live-service game, like one of the older Final Fantasy games. There are no daily login rewards, so you should be okay, right? Well... maybe? If you don't try to 100% games, they can be more fun, but sometimes these grinds are not optional. And that's where the problem arises.

In some games, you will eventually run into obstacles like an enemy you can't defeat, especially if you're trying to optimize the time you spend on the game. The only way to get past a tough section it is to get better weapons, armor, and equipment or materia. Welcome to the grind.

Grinding can be fun in some cases. Part of the fun of playing World of Warcraft back in the day was grinding with friends and building your relationship through shared boss battle trauma. The issue is that some games implement artificial difficulty and busywork to force players to explore the world or spend hours farming loot and gear to take on a particular boss. I'm not sure about you, but I don't seek to escape the real world to get stuck doing work in-game!

Some games implement these sections as optional rewards. Take Monster Hunter's fishing minigame, for example. In Monster Hunter: World (one of those games I could play forever) and Monster Hunter: Rise, fishing is an optional subgame that can grant you resources to use in battle or back at the hub to do certain things. Yet, identical items are easily obtainable elsewhere if you don't feel like wasting your time fishing. I want more games to do this.

The worst offenders of time-wasting games are the ones who force you to wait to do something. I've never liked the "energy" mechanic since it was introduced in Farmville, and I still don't. Mechanics like this are often used to frustrate players into caving in and making optional in-app purchases.

Forget the Grind, I Have Money

In the past I spent money on a few in-game items that helped me to skip the grind. I am not proud about it, but I recognize that it's the outcome that the developer wanted from me.

From buying in-game currency to getting "booster packs" that help players progress faster, these are the bread and butter of live-service games. It's how they earn money from you. But some things can't even be bought with cash. They are time-gated, and you can only get them for special events. If you want to frustrate people into spending more time on a game than they otherwise would, this is how you do it.

There's no reason for this simulated scarcity other than a desire to artificially drive players to show up in their games for events. I've done it before, and I probably will do it again because this particular system has its hooks in me. But I'm trying not to fall victim to this tactic.

In all my time playing these games, I've realized a few "green flags" that highlight a game as respectful of my time:

It's a relatively short list, but it's surprising how few games seem to tick all of the boxes. But if we want to influence how games are made, we ought to reward the developers who do these things and avoid those who don't.

On an individual level, we can't do much to convince companies to change monetization tactics. Microtransactions are a core part of many of these games, and they've trained players to press the button and get a treat.

Do you feel the same? If you haven't got a lot of time for gaming, you might want to try some games that work best over quick sessions.