Coming Attractions / Hundred-Hour Second Chances

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SUMMER ARC

Happy Wednesday, friends! I celebrated my third wedding anniversary this week and then promptly got sick, so there was quite a bit less time than usual for writing reviews of obscure 4X games or for effusively praising the Finns. This week, I wanted to touch base with you regarding the (increasingly positive) state of the newsletter and say a bit about our plans for the summer. Things are looking good!

May was a busy and exciting month for The Spieler. We published four essays with which I’m very pleased, and one of them — my review of 2020’s Shadow Empire — smashed all of our previous records for readership and shares. We blew past the fifty Subscriber mark several months ahead of my most optimistic predictions. Thanks again for reading, and a special thanks to everybody who’s commented and shared with others.

The latter half of 2025 looks very bright indeed. Over the summer, I’ll look to continue expanding the publication’s reach and, with a little luck, start extracting a bit of cash from it. There are still no plans to directly paywall any part of the newsletter because, in short, I’d rather have as many folks reading as are interested for the foreseeable future. That said, I’ll soon make good on my day-one promise to operationalize ways of supporting The Spieler beyond just subscribing for coin. My existing compromise with the Substack-Stripe axis remains, though, and by far the best way to support The Spieler’s ongoing work is to sign up for a monthly or yearly Paid Subscription. The weekly newsletter and our other work on Substack will remain the core of the publication no matter what, and all paid subscribers will entitle themselves to any incentives I may decide to offer elsewhere. Expect to hear more about that shortly.

Finally: it won’t surprise you to hear that, in order to produce this newsletter about game design, I end up playing and recording a great deal of video games. I’m going to start streaming on The Spieler’s official YouTube channel from time to time, which will hopefully give me an excuse to start finishing and posting the video content that I’ve been obstinately putting off for six months.¹ It should be a great way of supplementing the core newsletter with all the stuff that doesn’t translate well to the page.

Okay, all done with the procedural stuff. Thanks for sticking it out with me! It’s a short one this week, but next week’s is already looking like a behemoth. After reading a great review of Kenshi by distinguished games-writing peer Scanlines, the game’s been occupying most of my spare attention. I’ll need to say my piece on the thing if I intend to sleep properly, so that’ll be our next review. Hope we see you then!

Now, as usual, I don’t want to slide into your inbox without giving you something to chew on. It occurred to me earlier that some of video gaming’s most rapid fanbases form around some of the least accessible experiences, which got me reflecting on all the games I now love that I didn’t like at first. Enjoy these loose reflections, and I’ll look forward to bringing you another big-ticket installment next week.

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SECOND CHANCES

So, I spent awhile digging through my various games libraries and tabulated the games on which I’ve logged over a dozen hours of playtime. I figured that would be a decent brightline to separate out the games that never clicked with me, but I was surprised to note a handful of games that I cannot honestly claim to like. The Total War games were highly over-represented, with three franchise titles boasting over twelve hours. Factorio had a few dozen, and Hearts of Iron IV came in up top with around 100. That last one’s easy enough to explain from having used it to keep in touch with friends, but the others are pretty compelling.

My apologies to all you Total War fans. I swear I’ve spent twenty years trying my damndest to like even one of them, but it just never works out. I get restless and exhausted almost straight away no matter the game or its context. Similar story with Factorio — I could never play it for more than twenty or thirty minutes at a time, excepting a brief period in college during which I had a Ritalin prescription and played the everloving shit out of it for a few weeks. Hmm… maybe the lack of powerful CNS stimulants is what’s standing in the way of my enjoying Total War.

Anyway, I also made a list of the games that I now love² but initially bounced off of:

• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (100 hours)

• Mount & Blade: Warband (140 hours)

• Shadow Empire (160 hours — have ya read my review yet?)

• RimWorld (200 hours)

• Kenshi (220 hours)

• Crusader Kings 2 (300 hours)

• Dwarf Fortress (No hard figure, but it’s definitely between 400–500 hours)

• Europa Universalis IV (680 hours)

Curiously, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: SoC is the only one of these games that has a traditional narrative structure and that lacks any sort of strategic management gameplay, suggesting that it’s possessed of some uniquely engaging element all its own. You can bet we’ll be talking about that franchise and its wild development history before long. God, I sure do wish my hardware could run the sequel.

Now, one of our guiding mandates here at The Spieler is to discern the ways in which video game design offers unique avenues of engagement with human psychology. One way that I think is underplayed: video games tend to be designed as whole-brain experiences, and this lends them to occupying the attention of even a bored or frustrated player for longer than would seem rational. It’s easy enough to sit through a movie with a boring second act or stick out a novel that drags for a few chapters, but why do we so often subject ourselves to hours of dysphoria in a video game when the opportunity cost is so obvious? I have a few theories.

SOCIALIZATION AND COMMUNITY

Simple enough, right? My most-played game of all time is Garry’s Mod, which I played for the better part of a thousand hours as a kid because its multiplayer servers were by far my most reliable social outlet. I wasn’t a particularly well adjusted lad, you see.

The spooky thing about my extensive time with Garry’s Mod is that I can barely remember a damn thing about it. If you gave me all day, I could probably list a dozen specific memories at most. This suggests that what kept me playing wasn’t even the game itself but the simple fact of being connected with other human beings with shared interests, which were very hard for me to come by in meatspace. I think this also explains why I filled the hole with Counter-Strike after aging out of Gmod, especially while attending college. A plurality of my peers in the computer science program who lasted until the advanced courses weren’t even conversational in English, so it was inevitable that I’d seek a social outlet elsewhere, right? Well, at least the Mandarin- and Hindi-speakers never called me a slur for stealing their kills.

Here’s the funny thing about the multiplayer-first experiences that have come to dominate so much of mainstream gaming: a large majority of their players seem not to derive all that much fun from the experience of playing them. It’s gotten to the point where entire playerbases develop internal cultures around despising their games and/or their fellow players. This tells me two things: first, that I should never touch League of Legends again; and second, that millions of regular gamers value their preferred games’ senses of community and togetherness more than they value said games’ recreational potential, i.e., the thing for which they are explicitly marketed and commercially sold.

Or, I mean, I guess they could also just be straight-up hooked. Let’s talk about seeking comfort in the absence of other stimulation.

PSYCHOLOGICAL COMFORT

I use the term “psychological comfort” in an attempt to capture several distinct but related categories. I think that, broadly speaking, there are a few ways in which video games can provide psychological comfort:

1. By relaxing and/or uplifting the player through calm, low-stakes gameplay

2. By soothing the player through repetitive gameplay with small but regular rewards

3. By being outright addictive and therefore offsetting the negative emotions associated with not playing

The second category explains quite a lot of the titles I listed above, especially the strategy games (Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis IV, Shadow Empire) and management sims (RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress). Shadow Empire is an interesting exception for a variety of reasons, but the others are in Garry’s Mod territory: I can barely recall anything specific about my hundreds of hours with them. In these cases, however, it’s best explained by their well-documented ability to channel the attention of their players for hours at a time. Finishing a micro-project in RimWorld or a mission in EU4 might only be worth a few particles of dopamine, but the games are deliberately built around repeatedly and ceaselessly reinforcing that reward structure.

EXPECTATIONS OF A WORTHWHILE EXPERIENCE

This extends a point I made in my May newsletter about video games as art objects, i.e., that Westerners tend to recognize art as that which provides us some kind of psychosensory delight or, failing that, something worth thinking and talking about. This seems to be a theme with all the high-profile game releases that get popularly recognized (fairly or not) as high art — The Last of Us, Death Stranding, anything Remedy Entertainment’s done since Max Payne 2…

Of course, no two people’s definitions of “worthwhile experience” are completely aligned, and this is probably more true of video games than of any other artform. Personally, I’m more than happy to spend many hours on a languid game if the experience of so doing stimulates my emotions and creativity. I also love walking around abstract art galleries and listening to Polish black metal, but I’d be a miserable pedant indeed if I expected the same of everyone else.³

The point of all this is that, as with most forms of popular media, acute enjoyment is not the only reason to continue playing a video game. Similarly, acute boredom is not necessarily a reason to stop playing a video game. We’ve all got a favored book, film, show, etc. with a slow chapter, boring second act, or weak episode — we stick with them anyway because we intuitively understand that the holistic experience will be worth the occasional drop-off in our engagement with them.

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So, with all that in mind, I’d love your perspectives on what I missed. Why else do you stick with a game that doesn’t immediately grab you or continuously satisfy you?

Thanks again for joining us on this abbreviated installment. I’ll look forward to joining you again next week for our review of the game whose world is so unforgiving that being sold into bondage is considered a positive outcome overall.

1. A bit of deep lore for you: I had an hour-long video review of Escape from Butcher Bay almost finished, but I tabled it after MandaloreGaming dropped a much better video review just as I was completing the edits. No worries — my version will be reborn in magnificent form one day.

2. The word “love” takes on a very complicated and fraught meaning with the Paradox grand strategy games listed here, but it would be disingenuous not to include them.

3. As opposed to the affable pedant I am in reality, I mean.