| I guess tl;dr not all videogames are bad - it's just a medium after all. But the interactive nature of games and game designer's needs to maximise engagement has led to certain game mechanics which are designed to tap into our desire for achievement. For me at least it is about difficulty and the feedback loop from delayed gratification and self-improvement that entails. If you climb everest you have to be physically fit - and you have to train for months/years. In reaching that goal, you will be both physically and mentally stronger so your sense of achievement is paired with some degree of improvement. But there are definitely games that are designed to tap into that human desire for improvement to snare you into the game. I arrived at this personal opinion after pumping ~15000 hours into an MMO: one day (while hiking, incidentally, I realised that MMOs were designed to feel a bit like real life. The grind felt a bit like a job/training for sports. Except it was easier: doing sports training for an hour everyday is HARD. Logging in to an MMO to craft for an hour or grind xp for an hour when you boil down to it is quite menial and fundamentally easy. But I realised when you're stuck in the weeds, the chase can feel real and the achievements in the game feel satisfying. I guess to me there's not much to personally gain from artificial strife of RNG and long xp grinds which you get in MMOs and mobile games. But I think they are designed to tap into our basic need for a sense of "achievement". I don't think it's impossible to find a sense of achievement through video games though but it will be games that require skilled input from the gamer. For PvE games that might be your Dark Souls or Hollow Knight. There are also input heavy games like Street Fighter or Devil May Cry. Similar to those are the music games like DDR or Guitar Hero On the other side of games you have PvP, and if the PvP is fair (ie not imbalanced by grind or P2W mechanics) then competition dynamics come into play and achievement there is really about beating other people. |