This title could invite some predictably pedantic replies like “To have fun! What’s wrong with you?” On the other hand, fending those off with an assertion like “Online Games Aren’t Really Fun Anymore” is far too simplistic to begin to grapple with the true breadth of the issue.
Like most facets of the digital attention economy, online gaming has transformed (and continues to) under the dual pressures of an expectation for exponential, ever-increasing profit growth combined with industry consolidation. Gamers are well familiar with the microtransaction-laden free-to-play pricing strategy, that in some cases can produce incredible profits, and at the very least provide continuous funding to justify keeping servers running for several years. It has also led to the gaming industry adopting a similar model of hyper-optimization for user “engagement” above all else that slowly made social media feel anything but social.
If games were purely boring, if all the fun had truly been sucked out by the corporate overlords, it seems logical that nobody would play. So it’s more accurate to say that modern online games sporadically trickle just enough fun to the user such that they continue to engage with an otherwise hostile environment. A digital Skinner Box, just like Reddit and other modern social media platforms.
I already suspected this, which is why I quit competitive online video games even before I had ever first considered quitting Reddit. However, the idea and temptation of returning to online games has crossed my mind several times, whereas after definitively breaking my Reddit addiction I have had zero desire to return to the site as a regular user. There had to be some unique aspects of video games as a digital habit — at least for me and, probably, others like me — that could lead to a stickier addiction. During the peak of my time as a “gamer,” especially summers between college semesters, I spent far more hours per week playing online games than I ever spent on Reddit.
The primary aspect that sets gaming apart from other digital habits is that the player is, at almost all times, an active participant. Social media and television put one in the seat of a passive observer, mostly or entirely just along for the ride that the show or algorithm takes them on. But gamers get to have an impact on the virtual world with every action; they get to be the hero; their actions can change the outcome and directly lead to a victory for themselves or their team. All wrapped up with the convincing allure of a social and competitive experience when playing online, either with real world friends or strangers, but that in most cases is no less of a hollow illusion than other forms of online interaction.
I have been exploring topics for my next book, and video game addiction is making a compelling case for itself. There are many books and resources with a scientific look at the underlying mechanisms of video game addiction, and a few that are written based on personal experiences. But none that I have seen combine those with an exposé-style look at the modern gaming industry and all the techniques that have been developed to keep players addicted. There’s a bunch of video essays online with discussions about dopamine, but these are oversimplified and superficial.
I haven’t played competitive online games in several years, and it’s been even longer since I played seriously and considered myself a “gamer.” Besides a brief stint as a colorful bean-shaped dude in the ultra casual party game Fall Guys that became an overnight cult sensation in August 2020 due to collective lockdown boredom, I had quit playing competitive online shooters some time in 2019, swearing off games like Counter-Strike and Overwatch. Prior to that, it wouldn’t have been uncommon for me to log twenty or even thirty hours per week in whatever my current favorite game was.
My experiences were outdated by about five years; to get a pulse on the current state of online games I would have to dive back into the virtual world to see if and how the state of it had changed and record my experiences. That’s a more professional way of justifying playing video games as “research.” In the process I expected to affirm my previous decision to quit and quickly press the eject button to return to a life in the real world.
A couple of months ago I downloaded Overwatch 2, and I spent some of my free time between home renovation projects playing it. There are some minor changes from Overwatch, and the game is now free-to-play. Upon logging in, I’m offered nothing for paying $40 for the original game back in 2016. All the silly cosmetic items that I earned by playing are still there, including several golden weapons which collectively show off that I wasted hundreds of hours playing the game’s ranked competitive mode. I decide to play a few rounds of Quick Play (the game’s casual mode) to learn what has changed since my departure in a low-stakes environment.
I pick Roadhog, a tank hero that I previously had a lot of playtime on. They’ve changed how he plays. I miss a lot of shots; my aim is much worse than it used to be. One of my teammates addresses me over the microphone; he informs me that I suck and suggests a different character to play. I don’t respond. My team loses, and a dramatic red “DEFEAT” appears on my screen. The same teammate that previously spoke out, as well as another teammate type in the chat, “report our tank.” This has been typical behavior in competitive game modes for a while, where players report teammates whom they feel performed poorly in the hopes that it will get them banned from the game. It’s interesting to see it in the game’s casual matchmaking mode.
The match ends and I am automatically inserted back into the queue to play again. I remember having to specifically click to queue again several years ago. This is that thing referred to as “reducing friction” in terms of optimizing for engagement. If I was more intelligent, I would have uninstalled Overwatch 2 right then and there. But I didn’t, instead my interest was piqued. Were those upset teammates an outlier? Did they only have fun if they won the game? Did they ever have fun? The answers to those questions as I would find out were respectively: no, probably, and maybe sometimes.
As I continued my “research” I quickly wandered over to the game’s ranked competitive mode, which I used to play obsessively. I am promised the ability to “work my way up the ladder in reworked competitive and earn exclusive rewards and bragging rights” or something like that. I’m not good at the game anymore. After some placement matches my rank is revealed to be gold, which seems to be slightly below average in terms of skill rating compared to other players. In competitive, I encounter more hostile teammates, as well as enemy players with overly aggressive banter after they lock in a win. I minimize Overwatch 2 between matches and take some notes on my experience.
Most players who used the game’s communication tools seemed pleasant at the start of the game. But as soon as the match looked like it wasn’t going in our favor it was common for people to start playing the blame game. Usually the tank role would be targeted for blame by teammates (there is a single tank among a five player team, making them the odd man out), or whichever player had egregiously low damage or healing output for their respective roles. Not infrequently, a player would be seen typing “gg” (short for good game) a minute or two into the match, indicating that they had already mentally accepted that their team was going to lose the match.
I would note “fun” as a comment if a match was truly enjoyable. Only about 20% of the competitive matches of Overwatch 2 that I played received this description. The rest of the matches were somewhere between boring (too one-sided) or an absurdly toxic environment (regardless of a win or loss). I can have fun losing if the match itself is competitive and the interactions are neutral or pleasant.
I tried to verbalize what made a match of a competitive shooting game like Overwatch 2 fun. In the end, I realized it’s far easier to list out all the different things that make a match unfun, then subtract those out to get the small percentage of matches that remain. The two biggest contributors to enjoyment were match quality (did a match feel relatively fair and balanced) and the interactions between fellow players.
A close back-and-forth match, win or lose? Fun. Matches that end with two or more teammates screaming at each other over their microphones? Unfun. A game where a player gives up and sits inactive waiting for the game to end? Also unfun.
Unfortunately, gamers make the culture of argument, insulting quips, and discourse on sites like Reddit look like a classy dinner party. I was called (or witnessed a teammate being called) many different slurs, racial and otherwise, most of which were not even accurate to me when considering their intended recipients. I experimented with being sympathetic: “Hey, sorry I’m not playing well today, I’ll swap characters and try to play better.” Occasionally this helped and they apologized; often it made the abuse worse because they knew that I had heard the original comment. Anecdotally, most of these players using voice communication to hurl abuse sounded like adults, not the teenagers one might expect.
Some trolls, upset that their verbal abuse garnered no response, would simply choose to stop playing and “throw” the game to punish their teammates and all but guarantee a loss. This has been a typical learned behavior in online competitive games for years, as it deflects personal responsibility for the game outcome from the thrower, as well as offers an additional avenue of frustrating their teammates.
Most of the biggest issues with player interactions in Overwatch 2 ― and really, every online game — are enumerated by the parent categories in the game’s reporting system:
- Abusive chat
- Gamethrowing/griefing
- Cheating
Which clearly aren’t enforced very well, as I encountered behavior against Blizzard’s “Code of Conduct” in the majority of matches I played. There’s a joke in there somewhere about the game servers being empty if they actually enforced those rules. But, it’s a good place to start for a list of what variables make a match of an online shooting game unfun when a player on either team is engaging in one of the above behaviors. To this list I would add:
- The match is overly one-sided and does not feel like a competition among two teams of similar skill
- A player on either team abandons the game (which directly results in the above outcome)
It’s worth noting that players can mute all forms of communication and play the game silently. Which may improve enjoyment for those who get upset having blame, abuse, and namecalling directed at them. At least for Overwatch 2, however, I don’t think this takes the percent of enjoyable matches anywhere near half. Aggrieved players have other methods of attempting to punish teammates who cannot hear them.
After that very first match of Overwatch 2 I had enough content to write an essay. After twenty hours I had enough observations to realize little had changed since I left online games, and all of my past experiences were as valid as ever. Despite that I felt a slight pull to keep playing, and slip back into old habits. I had to ask myself:
If I’m not having fun most of the time, and well aware of all the psychological and design tricks to get me to keep playing this game, why do I want to keep playing?
The fun matches of a game are incredibly fun. But as noted, these are a minority and the remainder of matches are unremarkable at best. The (not infrequent) bad matches are really quite terrible, possibly downright hostile to one’s mental health. This leads to a variable reinforcement schedule as proposed by B.F. Skinner in his research on the resilience of learned behavior in rats. Gamers subconsciously recognize that if they keep queuing into matches, they will eventually get an incredibly fun match. One where they participate in making winning plays, get praised by friendly teammates, and (at least for a brief moment) demonstrate a level of skill possibly on par with the professional players. Every other match in between is simply filler; a hole in a punch card to earn a ticket towards that experience.
The result is that the idea of online gaming is always better than the reality. I think it has something to do with the selective memories we form from our time playing games. You remember your best moments, best plays, the most cooperative and friendly teams you’ve played on, the humble yet deserved losses. These are the things that stand out amidst a pile of hundreds of hours of time playing on autopilot, getting berated by teammates, failing to hit the shots you feel you should have, getting stomped on by players much better than you who don’t belong at your rank but are abusing the system, or realizing that whether your rank in the game stays the same or goes up or down it doesn’t really mean anything at all when you exit the game.
What is the point of modern online games? Ideally you’ll participate in the microtransaction economy and buy the cosmetic items or whatever. If, like me, you don’t care about that stuff and refuse to spend money on it, you still have value. You’re a number in a column on a report of “Monthly Active Players” to show the shareholders. You keep the game populated and the queue times reasonable for the players that do spend.
In return, you’ll get an occasional controlled dose of fun injected through your eyeballs and directly into your brain. Whether this pattern comes about through happenstance or intentional rigging, does it really even matter? You close the game and you’re exactly the same as you were when you opened it. You were too distracted to work out, again. You still have to do the dishes. You still have to go to work or school tomorrow. Escapism is a loan, and debts must be paid back.
There are few moments of studied self-reflection deeper than what is experienced after spending one’s evening losing five matches in a row of an online video game while getting called every name under the sun by strangers on the internet. Yet some people return the very next day for more. As for me, I knew my experiment had to end at the point where I could have instead read three or four books during the total time I had spent playing.
I uninstalled Overwatch 2 from my computer a couple of weeks ago. I won’t be going back, to that game or any other online game. I had learned what I set out to learn, which was mostly what I expected. Had online gaming gotten worse since I left? Or was it roughly the same, and it was my perspective that had shifted? In any case, the fun seemed harder to find and the toxicity far too easy.
Perhaps so many players online are upset precisely because they understand the diminishing value proposition and the opportunity costs in front of them. As the fun in online gaming gets harder to find, the search for it becomes ever more desperate, leading to frustration boiling over.
I’ve got many more thoughts about this topic, and thus far have only scratched the surface. If you have a personal experience with gaming addiction or quitting video games that you’d like to share to contribute to my future work, please reach out via email.