The Delusion That Makes Videogames So Addictive

Also, pictures of my Very Cute Dog

Yesterday, I saved the world, ushering in a new age of harmony and prosperity to my kingdom.

I also cleaned up a lot after my sick dog.

These two things are related.

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So my dog is an adorable nine-month-old puppy, as you can see from this photo here:

And the second book of my Dragons of Oklahoma series, still available here for a mere $2.99, is dedicated to him:

The exact dedication is “For Sitka, my newest, puppiest dragon”

My dog’s name is Sitka, and he is part pittie, part boxer, all sweet. Not a malicious bone in this dog’s body. He’s responding well to training, becoming calmer and more affectionate…

And he’s also had a rampant case of the runs for the last five days, necessitating middle-of-the-night walks and impromptu house cleanings.

If you’re about to tell me what to do when a dog has stomach problems: you’re part of the problem I’m gonna discuss.

Because my Mom knows what to do: boiled chicken, that’s the trick for a sick dog.

Except our dog trainer said no, you feed a sick dog bone broth on the first day, two ounces every four hours, and then cooked ground turkey. And no rice, rice irritates the stomach.

My partner Keri said I needed pumpkin, no-sugar pumpkin filling works well for stopping up a dog.

And the vet, when we finally got an appointment in, said that probiotics and maybe I/D prescription food would fix this. Oh, and boiled chicken and rice, rice helps the digestive system.

Meanwhile, we were trying everything people told us to do, and still having to hose out a cage twice a night.

Now, I’m sure this will clear up - we saw the vet after the weekend, got amoxicillin to knock out any potential infections, and we’re having his stool samples tested.

But the uncertainty is what’s getting us. Here we are, wondering whether this is something serious - after all, we didn’t think the disease that claimed our last dog’s life was serious until it very much was. We’re wondering what kind of food we should give the dog. We’re wondering whether he’s sick because he’s stressed about something. We’re wondering how to balance our desire to watch over him 24/7 to prevent accidents with our desperate need for sleep.

Tending to a dog with a cranky tummy is a reasonably simple problem - yet here we are, awash in too many options.

I mean, heck with my dog, I don’t even know what I should eat - I mean, not my preferred repast of cake and chocolate milk, obviously! But there’s studies debating the health of red meat, of wine, of cooked vs raw vegetables, of how many minerals you should get and in what doses from what sources, whether intermittent fasting helps, and above all, balancing what tastes good to me with what’s good for me…

Which, as a diabetic with liver damage, makes everything I choose to eat a bit of a stressor. Ultimately, I have to take an educated guess as to what my ideal diet should be -

- but I don’t get to see the other options. I can’t rewind the clock to my 20s to eat a different diet and see whether I would not have fatty liver and diabetes come age 55. All I can do is commit to one option, and hope.

Same with my career. I’ve stuck with the same job for almost 25 years now - would I have done better at another company? And with money! When I make an investment, is this a wise place for my money or am I gonna lose my shirt? And with romance! When I date this person, will they become a trusted companion or another regrettable breakup for the pile?

Point is, every day we’re committing to decisions with incomplete information and long-term consequences we cannot undo. We humans get used to that background level of stress - or, at the very least, we learn to cope with it, because we have no other alternative.

It’s stressful on the macro level and stressful on the micro level. Right now, my dog is whining. My dog whines a lot. Does this mean he’s about to splatter the floor if I don’t let him out right now, or is he just bored?

I’ll find out one way or another.*

But in between spraying copious amounts of dog enzyme remover on my carpet, I was finishing up my 100+ hour run on Metaphor: Refantazio, an RPG brought to you by the people who made Persona. It’s basically “Persona, but in a political medieval world.”

Pretty badass, right?

So I had to make allies as I navigated the kingdom, battling monsters and deciding which companion I would spend time to bond with that day.

Epic stuff, really. Much more complex than deciding on a dog’s food intake for the day.

Yet it wasn’t. Saving the kingdom was trivial. Because:

Unlike my dog, I was presented only with a handful of options at every step, and only one was the correct one. If my dog was a videogame, I’d be presented with something like “Boiled chicken / Pumpkin / Prescription food,” and at worst I’d have a one-in-three chance at nailing it.

Unlike my dog, I could look up a tutorial that walked me through, step-by-step, how to beat this unfathomably tough boss monster of a stomach - and victory was guaranteed if I followed the directions.

Unlike my dog, if I screwed up, I could reload an earlier save and see how I could have done it better.

Now, there’s lots of debates over what the appeal of videogames is… Which is a stupid debate, because videogames (like animation) are merely a medium to transmit art. Do the games I’m drawn to have clear choices and predictable outcomes? Sure, but there’s a lot of PVP games and misery simulators that don’t. Do I like games that are power fantasies? Sure, but there’s plenty of games that have no stories at all, or are actually designed to make you feel powerless.

(Here’s a two-hour-long, surprisingly riveting video on a game that’s designed to make you feel small and powerless.)

Yet when we talk about videogames, I think one of the reasons they’re such a potent entertainment is they let you experiment with predictable outcomes.

Hey, you wanna personally gun down every last living creature in this settlement, just to see what happens? Go ahead, then reload if you feel guilty. Don’t know where to go next for this cryptic quest in Elden Ring? There’s a wiki that walks you through it. Want to get the full Zodiac set of furniture in Animal Crossing? Well, you’ll have to grind - a lot - but eventually you can get it with enough patience, guaranteed.

For some of us, videogames are a window to a life that we don’t get to live. Noah Caldwell-Gervais, my favorite YouTube essayist, once opined that one of the reasons games like Fallout were so successful was because it’s become a collective form of travel. Most folk can’t afford the time or expense for a month-long walkabout… but they can sure as hell trek across a virtual Mojave, bask in the neon lights of New Vegas, head to a faceoff at Hoover Dam.

But I’d also add that videogames are, for some of us, a compelling fantasy because every decision leads to a known (and usually positive) payoff. We live in a world where you can stay up at night fretting about whether you should be volunteering more, whether you should be exercising more, whether you’re dating the right people or neglecting your friends. What’s the right balance for you? There’s too many options to say for sure, only likely outcomes - and you only get one roll of the die.

Whereas in videogames, blissful videogames, you get to decide whether to throw the baby in the oven - and you know for sure whether it was the right decision, and you can always reload if it got too bad.

Technically speaking, juggling political alliances to battle a mad God should be magnitudes harder than choosing to feed my dog stewed chicken or ground turkey.

Yet it’s not harder, because the videogame features tons of tiny, carefully curated, options, each with one optimal answer and a guaranteed payoff. My dog is just a frustrating guess.

My dog: Extremely dignified.

Which is why I’d rather be playing videogames than real life. Yet I live in the real world; I’m sanguine enough to realize that the cost of existing here means that I am obliged to deal with life’s inconsistencies.

But lots of people don’t.

Any time you see people who live as though there’s a guaranteed outcome for any behavior in life, they have turned the world into a videogame… and usually to their detriment.

You see it in the aspiring tech bros who are 100% certain that if you get up at 5 a.m. and hustle until nightfall, you will absolutely become a millionaire before you’re 30. You see it in the organic nutritionist who knows, absolutely knows, that if you take the right nutrients you’ll never get cancer. You see it in the religious zealots who know that not only is there a God, but they understand God so well that they’re 100% sure they’re doing exactly what God wants.

In a way, I envy those people. It must be lovely, waking up with the heady knowledge that if you take the correct steps, you will always succeed.

But life doesn’t always work that way; realistic people know that. You can work hard to become a millionaire and still not get the talent or the breaks for it. You can still get cancer even if you eat perfectly and exercise every day. And if there is a God (and keep in mind, I do believe that), I’m pretty sure you don’t know Them as well as you think you do.

To quote one colossal nerd: “Failure is always an option.” To quote another: “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.”

And let’s be fair; the flip side to Jean-Luc’s statement is that it is possible to commit mistakes and win. Sometimes someone who doesn’t have the talent to become a millionaire catches a lucky break. Sometimes someone who smokes like a chimney and eats asbestos Pop Tarts never contracts cancer. Sometimes God, if They exist, smiles on the absolute worst people for reasons we will never understand.

Some folks can’t handle this uncertainty - so they rewrite reality, or at least their own interpretation of it. They make up their own 100% guaranteed path to success - and when that turns out not to work for everyone, they either ignore the failed outcomes or they quietly change the path.

It’s never the path’s fault. They just didn’t follow the directions strictly enough.

And life being what it is, sometimes they get what they’re after! But more often, they go raving to their grave with mad delusions of grandeur, dying in a cloud of contradictions they cannot possibly process.

Me? I visit the world of Metaphor: Refantazio. Sparingly. It’s where, on occasion, I scratch that very human itch to live in a controllable world, a predictable world, a world that wants me to succeed.

Then I’m back to choosing what to feed my tummy-troubled dog. It’s confusing. It’s a little scary. It’s ambiguous.

But it’s what I got to work with.

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Hey, if you got this far, I have a new series out, about baby dragons and small-town life and lots of funny stuff, and it’s all available for, well, pretty cheap. Check it out.

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* - He was just bored. The little jerk.