My parents were relatively strict with our gaming screen time when I was growing up. I didn’t get my first game system until 1998, when I was around 11 years old. My first game was Pokemon Red on the GameBoy Color. On my first day with the handheld console, I played until past my bedtime, using a flashlight so I didn’t tip off my mom and dad. The only thing that stopped me from playing the entire night was my rechargeable AA batteries dying.

Little did I know that this night was a sign of things to come. By the time I got to high school, I played games like Day of Defeat, a first-person shooter based on World War II, for hours at a time as computers incorporated online multiplayer options where I could game with my friends from school or people I met online. 

My mom would set a kitchen timer, a little chicken you twist to a designated amount of time, to limit my gaming. Unbeknownst to her, I’d sneak into the kitchen while she wasn’t looking and twist the chicken a little more, squeaking in just a few more minutes of gaming before I had to start my homework.

Diablo II: The Gaming Gateway Drug

Diablo II is my most-played game of all time. My brother bought the game sometime after it was released in 2000, around the time I was twelve. I played for a few hours but had no idea what I was doing and wasn’t that interested at first. But one random day in the high school cafeteria, a handful of years later, a few friends and I decided to pick up the game and play online.

In my stressful high school years, I found that the game was a perfect meditative distraction, a repetitious blend of grinding levels, meaning killing more monsters to gain experience so your skills can improve, and farming for gear like armor and weapons that you can equip to improve your skills and damage. Though the game is somewhat challenging at times, the repetitious ease of these small tasks was both relaxing and exciting. My sorceress would cast fireballs, or my barbarian would swing around like a whirlwind with an axe in both hands, blasting through hundreds of monsters and demons, some of them bosses who could drop precious, rare loot.

Like little dopamine goblins, my friends and I would load into a game, take out the toughest bosses who had the highest chance of dropping the best loot, pray to RNGesus (the random-number-generator god), celebrate or mourn, leave the game, and start again, all within a few seconds or minutes. 

The Diablo II developers must have hired psychiatrists and behaviorists because the RNG that was coded into the game works almost the exact same way as casino slot machines today. We’d sometimes have hours of dry spells, killing these bosses without getting any good loot. Just as our spirits started to fade, a deep-golden text flashes on the screen after a kill, an item that has a one-in-twenty-thousand chance of dropping landing in our lap. A rush of dopamine-riddled blood reaches our brains, and we scream.

That’s why in 2020 when they released a remastered version of the original Diablo II, a huge group of millennial and Gen-X gamers were excited for the burst of nostalgic dopamine about to enter our veins. The world of gaming had changed incredibly since I rocked out to my Limewire-downloaded alternative rock playlist on WinAmp as I slayed demons in the original game. Diablo II: Resurrected came with updated graphics, new gameplay features, fresh items, and, unfortunately, new ways to get you invested in playing more often. After a 10-year hiatus, I simply had to pick up this remaster.

The Diablo II formula was my “gateway drug” into gaming addiction. Sure, I had played games before this and got involved in gaming communities in high school. But there was really no feeling like that dopamine rush that “DII” gave you, enough to spend all day thinking about when I’d get another chance to play.

“Gacha” Gaming Got Me

I hesitate to admit this, but I’ve been playing a “gacha” game since 2019. If you’ve ever watched a YouTube video and have games in your algorithm anywhere, you’ve probably seen the Raid: Shadow Legends ads. I spend an embarrassing amount of time on this game, and even though I am considered a “low spender,” I have spent cash, too.

I remember vividly the first time I spent money on the game. I was alone in the school copy machine room in 2018, then a teacher, copying my 15th vocabulary quiz of the quarter. I embarrassingly shoved my phone in my pocket when a coworker walked in. Somehow, in the violent movement, my thumb pressed the right spot on the screen, purchasing a pack of gear for $12.99. What a bargain!

“Well,” I thought to myself, “I guess this will be the game I play, then.” Before this, I dabbled in other mobile games in my free time, from TsumTsum, a Disney-themed puzzle game I played in Japan, to “AFK” games that collect supplies in the background when you’re away from your phone. I jumped from game to game when I hit a plateau, usually by design, progress hidden behind a paywall (or lost my progress when I moved out of Japan).

In the four years of playing this game, I have spent upwards of $200 on it. Not a crazy amount by any means, but more than I’d like to freely admit. Even worse, though, is that Raid, a game that used to take a maximum of an hour a day to play back in 2019, has slowly added more and more content, dungeons and bosses that, by design, take more time than ever. The development team focused on creating difficult levels, adding game mechanics that cause problems for the players. Then, they slowly incorporated characters into the game that “fixed” the problem. The only way to get these characters is by pulling “Shards,” which are very limited for free-to-play players. Players are constantly bombarded by pop-up ads of packs that sell the rarest shards. Events like “two time pulls” for the best champions, the ones with the skills needed to advance to new levels, are filtered in almost every day.

So, the cycle of the game introduces a problem, releases a fix to the problem, and gives the players a chance to get the fix by introducing challenges that only “whales” can achieve. Whales are people who spend thousands of dollars a month on said games, either independently wealthy, content creators who make videos about the game to pay for their microtransactions, or people with massive credit card debt.

Then there are krakens, millionaires who put whales’ spending to shame. They download games, buy every pack the game puts in front of them and usually don’t have any idea of how to play. The saddest part is the game only needs 1% of its player base to buy these insane items they put “on-sale” to continue these predatory practices. 

All of these practices prey on players’ perpetual “fear of missing out” (FOMO). If I can get this next released character, I can keep up with the krakens. Even free-to-play or “low spenders” like me are sucked into this FOMO, spending more time on the game than money to access the new levels and experiences.

In the summer of 2022, I transitioned from teacher to freelance writer. Suddenly, I had tons of free time. In between sessions of editing my resume, completing the little work I had at the time, browsing through job listings, and tracking down job leads, I’d open up Raid for a break. At first, it was a few clicks here and there. Then, the clicks turned into five minute breaks, then thirty minutes then more.

I’d tell myself, “I just need to complete this one task to get the next big thing to progress my account,” and boom, an hour goes by. What was once something I used to kill time now kills all my time. What was once a fun hobby has become something similar to a job. A job that takes your money instead of giving it to you.

COVID-19 Sparks the Age of the Bippy Bois

Just before the pandemic hit, we celebrated my girlfriend’s 28th birthday at a local brewery. There, my friend Sam and I convinced a third friend, Nick (yes, the same group that traveled to Venice), to join us in a game called Hunt: Showdown. As we were saying goodbye for the evening, he reluctantly agreed.

Hunt: Showdown is an intense player-versus-player-versus-environment first-person shooter. For most, that sentence sounds like a load of gibberish. The important thing you need to know is the skill gap is huge, and taking on a game like this requires time, patience, and teamwork. In short, it was a major commitment. But coincidentally, Nick (and Sam and I) suddenly had lots of free time on our hands as everything shut down for the foreseeable future as the world struggled with the initial outbreak of COVID-19.

The three of us spent many afternoons and evenings in the “bayous” of Hunt: Showdown, skulking through muddy terrain, avoiding zombie grunts and women possessed by insect spirits who assail you with swarms of poisonous bees.

The game tapped into a particular flavor of obsession. The slow, creeping tension of sneaking through the map, terrified to make noise because a single misstep — a snapped twig, a started crow — could give away your position. It’s the only game that’s ever made my heart hammer in my chest just from the sheer terror of being the last one standing against the rest of the server.

Every match dangles the perfect mix of dread and dopamine — just enough success to keep the hope alive, just enough failure to keep you grinding. Whoever leaves with the boss’s token is the winner. The few times you get to leave the game alive, the text over the screen reads, “You live to die another day” as you exit to the lobby. An ominous message considering global events at the time.

The pandemic changed so many things, and the gaming industry was one of the major benefactors. According to Statista data, gaming time increased 39% during the pandemic. Nick, Sam, and I played mostly intense first-person-shooter games like Hunt: Showdown and Overwatch. We started referring to ourselves as “The Bippy Bois,” taken from Sam’s use of, “Oh, I heard a ‘bip,’” or a gunshot in the distance, during one of the noise-based standoffs in Hunt. 

When we realized the intensity of the games we were playing was too extreme, adding unnecessary stress to our lives, we slowly incorporated more casual, light-hearted games into our repertoire. We picked up Terrarira during a sale, a relaxed, 3D scroller with amazing music and chill gameplay. 

From March 2020 through the summer, the Bippy Bois logged onto these three games for hours upon hours. In a time that sunk people into deep loneliness, the three of us played our way through it. Sam wrote us all theme songs that now play whenever we enter the Discord server — the messaging app we use to communicate while we’re playing.

When things started picking back up the 2020 fall semester, we were forced to cut back our game time. But the camaraderie from those days held strong, and we continued to play in the evenings when we spent time together.

When I moved to Rome in 2022, the gaming time got even more complicated. Time differences, life, and work have made connecting with the Bippy Bois much rarer. But in the late evening, when all three of us can come together and play, these are some of the moments I look forward to most.

A Serious Person? Reflecting on Gaming Addiction

There’s a phrase I keep seeing online recently: “So-and-so is not a serious person,” describing a politician prioritizing something out of touch. “This is not a serious sports team” after my favorite basketball team loses embarrassingly… again. Every time I hear it, my brain doesn’t immediately jump to politics or sports. It jumps to me and how much time I’ve spent planted in front of my computer instead of doing something more “productive.”

I often catch myself thinking, “I’m not a serious person.” It’s not hard to, especially with the societal perception of millennials as “lazy and entitled” pops into my head. When I log into a game in the middle of the day, the session that I originally intended to use as a 20-minute break turns into a few hours. Or when YouTube tosses a Diablo II video into my suggestions, it awakens the dopamine goblin in me as I’m tempted to boot up the old PC and game.

But then I think, that’s really okay. There are plenty of serious people. There are also plenty of people who stream video games in their parents’ attic every single day for 16 hours straight. Their gameplay, reaction videos, and appearances at conferences earn them enough money to continue their habits. 

And who am I to say that they’re not being productive? How is having a “subscription marathon,” playing in front of a live audience for several days any less “grindset” than Elon Musk huffing ketamine and yelling at his workers for 18 hours a day?

I briefly dabbled in streaming on Twitch a handful of times, mostly at the tail end of my teaching career. It started off fun enough: a little wine to ease the stage fright, chatting with my audience of mostly students while playing the Overwatch 2 beta. But once I moved to Rome, juggling time zones and trying to keep an audience made the whole thing feel like work.

So, I gave up on this dream pretty quickly. Gaming for me isn’t a job; it’s a hobby. A way to unwind, kill time, or meet up with some of my best friends on the other side of the world. But when gaming affects my job, interferes with my actual work, and puts a strain on my relationships, then it’s not a hobby. It becomes a vice. These games know how to pull me in, and if I’m not playing it, I’m thinking about it.

There’s still a lot of processing I have to do about my gaming habits. I’m obviously not happy with the amount of time it eats up. On the other hand, I don’t want to give up the communities and friendships I’ve made. With everything, there needs to be a balance, and as of yet, I haven’t hit that balance. But maybe I’ll load up some Diablo II: Resurrected and really meditate on this problem.