Killing the Time Occupiers
/On this non-magic Sunday, I have a small piece of life advice that is probably only useful to a tiny percentage of you. But it may have broader implications as well.
One of the wisest decisions I ever made for myself was to remove most games from my phone. Puzzle games (like Candy Crush) and word games (like Wordscapes) are designed to be addictive. And yet, for me at least, they provide absolutely no long-term pleasure.
I’m not anti-gaming. I just want to avoid games that are simply addictive time occupiers. I can look back and remember enjoying Mario Odyssey. But I don’t have a single memory of the hours of my life I wasted on fucking Candy Crush. It never happens that someone looks over to me and sees me smiling wistfully, asks what’s on my mind and I reply, “Oh… I was just remembrering Level 1512 of Candy Crush. What a joy! My favorite part was when I crushed the candy!”
I’m not suggesting that all gaming is worthless (I’ll give you a game recommendation at the end of this post). And I’m not saying that you have to always be doing something productive with your time. But I feel like if you’re doing something for pleasure, then it should be something you can look back on and say, “That was fun.” That’s not been my experience with these types of games.
I’m not lecturing you. I’m lecturing myself. I spent way too much time on these games. I didn’t learn anything. I didn’t experience anything. They didn’t make me laugh. They barely made me think. It was just a waste of my goddamn time.
If you can limit yourself to a few minutes a day, then it probably doesn’t matter. But if you find yourself getting sucked in and suddenly an hour has passed, I recommend just deleting it from your phone. You have a few minutes to kill? Read an ebook. Pull out some cards or coins and work on something. Magic is a hobby that you can indulge in while requiring very little pocket space—it’s not, like, archery or something—might as well take advantage of that. Worried you might look like a dork practicing your Elmsley Count while waiting for your prescription to be filled? Get over yourself. No one cares about what you’re doing. Yes, if you’re sitting in a bar by yourself, executing card flourishes for attention, you look like a douchebag. But if you’re minding your own business and working on your own shit, nobody really cares.
Now, what did I mean at the top of this when I said it may have “broader implications”? Well, you can extrapolate out from this mindset beyond video games. Are there other things in your life that are time occupiers but you don’t look back on with any sort of fondness? Do you drink every night because you really enjoy it and you’re having an absolute blast getting tipsy and raucous with people you care about? Or are you—as that Modest Mouse song says—trying to “drink away the part of the day that you cannot sleep away”? When you look back on the past month with your wife, do you remember enjoying it? Or is she just some woman you liked 18 years ago, and now you’re miserably muddling through life together?
“Hey, I don’t come onto a magic blog to be reminded of how miserable I am!”
I get it. I won’t push the subject.
One game I’ve enjoyed recently is Sayonara Wild Hearts on the iphone (and maybe elsewhere). They call it a “pop album video game” and it is just as much an album as it is a video game. If you don’t like the style of music (a kind of ethereal dream pop) it doesn’t make much sense to play it. But as a combination album/game/surrealistic experience, I find it to be very enjoyable.
One tip I would have is to change the settings on the game so that the controls are extra-sensitive. I find it makes the game much more playable.