An Open Letter to Open-World Video Games (Part 3)
One closeted video gamer's confessions about the genre he just can't quit
Part 3: The Elephant in the Room
We’re all playing games now
Someone reading this may have never played a video game in their life. Yet I’m willing to bet they still know the feeling of checking their phone for the time and, twenty minutes later, ending up lost in a whirlwind of texts, news, and digital detritus.
Video games are just one example of hyper-stimulating activities that hijack our motivation and willpower. These include social media, online shopping, the 24-hour news cycle, sports betting, pornography, and YouTube. Just imagine anything that makes Andrew Huberman bristle with scientifically validated indignation.
The rectangular device you’re reading this article on often overrides your focus and reward circuitry. It contains dozens more apps that are designed to be addictive. Left unchecked, these temptations exploit our natural hunter-gatherer instincts, transforming them into compulsive, hyperactive behaviors. You start out as Frodo, earnestly seeking adventure and end up as Gollum, consumed by a singular obsession. Many of our brightest authors and podcasters blame all of this for our shortened attention spans, depressed moods, wrecked libidos, and polarized politics.
What truly scares me is isn’t that I can’t quit video games. It’s that I could quit them tomorrow and still not escape their influence. Our world now resembles an open-world video game, filled with weaponized distractions masquerading as meaningful activities. As open-world video games aptly illustrate, this dynamic is as profitable as it is insidious, which is precisely why it’s everywhere. With dark design patterns and endless novelty turning us into our most compulsive selves, can any of us truly quit playing?
Who is the hero, villain, and NPC?
Horror movies tend to fall into two archetypes based on the location of evil. It’s either lurking in the darkness beyond our firelight or the darkness that resides within us.
With video games, however, the threat is both external and internal. They intrigue and scare me because their power comes from profit-seeking corporations and my dopamine-seeking brain. As I get older, it gets harder to say if the role they play in my life is healthy, benign, or malicious.
They’ve made employment bearable and unemployment unbearable, taking me to beautiful imaginary worlds and dark recesses of my mind. While I long for the days when I could lose myself in video games, I wonder if I’m chasing nostalgia for my youth that I’ll never recapture, no matter how good the graphics get on the next generation of PlayStation. I doubt I’ll lie on my deathbed wishing I’d spent a few more hours grinding in games with the same certainty that I know I won’t wish for more time on emails and Slack messages.
Yet I can’t deny the joy and meaning games like Red Dead Redemption 2, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Ghost of Tsushima brought into my life. These games are profoundly useful. They dovetail perfectly with our exhausting economy and precarious modern existence. Friends and I look to video games when our jobs or personal lives are so intense that a digital escape feels like the only relief.
Has this exercise just been a long goodbye to video games?
No, but it might be a bittersweet love letter to a coping mechanism that I’ve relied on since childhood. When my adolescent anxiety felt overwhelming I focused on winning Age of Empires III. When the reality of working life felt soul-draining, I escaped to the islands of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag. When a pandemic ruined everything, I found freedom, beauty, and purpose in Red Dead Redemption 2. These experiences all taught me that dissociation, which video games excel at providing, is ultimately a limited form of emotional regulation.
By now, a pragmatist would suggest avoiding Ubisoft games with the same conviction that I seek out Kermit Lynch wines. A productivity guru would recommend quitting video games with the confidence of Andrew Huberman banishing his water heater and ex-girlfriends from his Malibu estate. Surprising no one, I’d like to take a more philosophical approach.
To start, you can’t blame people for loving video games. You can’t even blame them for loving them more than their real lives. In your world full of laundry, dishes, and taxes you are Sisyphus. In video games you get to be Odysseus, at least for a few hours. Whether you believe this creation is monstrous or magical, you can’t deny the quality of the engineering.
What’s stuck with me are the emotions. Riding through Big Valley in Red Dead, the beauty of the wildflowers and the babbling brook took my breath away. In Horizon Zero Dawn’s sequel, Forbidden West, I climbed a Half Dome-esque cliff, took in the vista, and then hang-glided to the valley floor. Riding across Tsushima, stopping to drink in the landscape and let Alexis pet foxes, I felt a calm sense of purpose that eludes me elsewhere. Even the greasy cheeseburger that was Far Cry 6 featured a surprisingly awesome playlist, introducing me to a banging duet between Luis Fonsi and Demi Lovato, a Jason DeRulo collab for the ages, and my second favorite song about feeling crazy. As much as I can articulately criticize them, disowning video games feels like giving up on a beautiful part of myself and the world of entertainment.
Stray thoughts
Recently, Alexis and I played Stray, a game where you’re a cat exploring post-apocalyptic Japan. It’s a small open-world and took about six hours to finish. The gameplay is simple yet satisfying: leaping, purring, scratching, and knocking things over. The result is a surprisingly cozy, relaxing, and wholesome experience. Unlike other games, Alexis played Stray nearly the whole time. She passed me the controller only to keep our cat avatar safe. This gave me a more nuanced perspective on gaming.
It’s easy to criticize new technologies like cell phones or video games because of how quick we are to misuse them. We often let them control our time rather than the other way around.
During COVID, I began to stay up later and later gaming. It affected my sleep, mood, and motivation. So I started setting alarms to stop playing but often ignored them. I know how dangerously dishonest the plea for “just five more minutes” is as well as any haggard parent does.
Left unchecked, one’s relationship to video games can spiral into addiction and ruin your life, much like alcohol, social media, and online shopping. Yet it feels easier to belittle video games due to the narrative that they’re a waste of time for kids or loner neckbeard men. While drinking, TikTok, and e-commerce are just as addictive, they’re not as easily stereotyped.
The urge to play is a core part of being human, just like singing or dancing.
The tools we use for entertainment are just tools. A deck of cards can be a magical part of a kids’ sleepover or toxic part of a grown man’s gambling addiction. I’ve seen a PlayStation controller take me to various emotional states, from depressive loneliness to transcendent exploration and social connection with Alexis and my friends.
Instead of total abstinence or unchecked indulgence, a healthy relationship with games starts with self-awareness. Intentionality and boundaries must shape your experience.
When I view an open-world game’s map as an endless to-do list, it becomes just another source of push notifications. When I slow down and focus on curiosity and play, these worlds become transcendent. I can find the same awe in the interstitial activities of Ghost of Tsushima or Horizon Forbidden West as I do on a camping trip—all without leaving my couch. On a cost per hour basis, video games are a remarkably affordable and rewarding indulgence.
I’m not alone in finding digital wandering beneficial. Jacob Geller, reflecting on his hours playing Red Dead Redemption 2, put it this way:
“I couldn’t be more grateful for this kind of space and this lack of structure, a reminder that you don’t always need people to give direction, don’t always need to calculate which of the two roads will get you through the wood a minute faster. Things don’t have to be constantly happening to remind you of being alive. These worlds may be artificial, the isolation coded, the darkness an illusion, but the feeling is real, and the feeling is one I’m learning to welcome.”
Geller’s experience captures the paradox of video games. They are vehicles for both harm and healing. You can find and lose yourself in these open-worlds. They allow unchecked consumption and self-indulgence more efficiently than anything seen outside of Wall-E or Mark Zuckerberg’s latest Powerpoint presentation. Yet, you can find wisdom, joy, and meaning in their pixels and polygons just as easily as you can find distraction, dissatisfaction, and doom.
What matters is ensuring that our technology enhances rather than detracts from our real lives. This starts with recognizing who and what make up the foundation of your life. Then, you must set and hold boundaries that protect rather than waste your time. I may need sturdier fences than iPhone alarms to guard mine.
Knowing all of this, I still have no idea what I will tell my kid when they inevitably beg me for a gaming console. The idea of having to police my children’s relationship to screen time terrifies me. Honestly, I don’t even fully understand or control my own. While I’m still walking the path of what all of this should look like for me, I know one thing: getting it right is not a game.