Comment by Pfhreak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pfhreak | Hacker News Reader

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I am a person who gives in easily to accessible compulsions. Whether it's snacks that are sitting out or picking up my phone and quickly checking twitter. I recognize these things are unhealthy, but they are so immediately available it's hard to avoid nibbling on them when they are around.

I've decided to try and disengage from Twitter by getting into mobile gacha games -- you know those games where you randomly collect stuff to play? (I chose Granblue Fantasy which is a JRPG with random characters/loot, but I've also played Puzzle and Dragons which is a match 3 with random loot).

While these games have, at best, a predatory financing model, I have noticed a significant uptick in my own mental health by replacing the casual Twitter check with the casual loot farm. I sleep better, I'm less anxious, I'm less impatient. Especially because a lot of the time I was looking at Twitter right before bed and seeing a constant stream of terrible news (and people being wrong on the internet, which must not stand.)

So, I dunno, I can't say I'd recommend getting into a grindy, random slot machine, but I can say it has been a salve for me right now.

"I am a person who gives in easily to accessible compulsions. "

As a person who doesn't use Twitter or any other social media myself, I ask you had this virus arrived in the days before the internet and you were similarly confined then how would you occupy yourself?

You know the scene in The Great Escape where Steve McQueen is bouncing a baseball endlessly against the wall while in solitary confinement?

> in the days before the internet and you were similarly confined then how would you occupy yourself?

Not the OP — but books and TV?

Board games, card games (in a pinch, solitaire's not just a program that ships with Windows), puzzles, puzzle books, music, radio. Writing, drawing, playing music, math. It's not like we had nothing to do before the Internet. We just couldn't watch/read/listen-to anything we wanted on a whim. It took a little planning. There was always plenty to do, you just couldn't go "I suddenly want to watch this movie I've not thought about in years, don't already own on VHS, and no-one I know has it either" then be watching it inside five minutes and without leaving the house. Or easily and quickly answer silly trivia questions ("who was the guy in that one thing?") unless you had the relevant trivia book (remember topic-specific books of trivia?) which meant you had to actually kinda care about the topic (enough to have bought the book) and couldn't just indulge every low-value "hm, I wonder".

[EDIT] oh and top-lists were less available so we were kinda happier with whatever was around, so far as media went. You had to be kind of a nerd for a topic to be exposed to much in the way of rankings or best-of lists (buy relevant magazines and books that contained them). Outside one's actual strong interests the thought "this may not be the best thing in this category I could be experiencing right now, I better go find out what that is" just never came to mind.

> We just couldn't watch/read/listen-to anything we wanted on a whim.

And that's often a good thing! I find that I read books a lot less now, because there's less motivation to invest deeply in any one book when it's almost certainly not the best one, and there's that niggling background feeling that I could go out and find something even better to read if I browsed a little more ….

As someone who has been really hooked into gatcha (I counted 9 hours yesterday) this is honestly true. It's very personally rewarding as compared to Twitter (if a massive time waste).

Are there many games that will let you gatcha for that long without dumping money into them?

Most gatcha want about a hour of your time to two hours a day, you can extend that to about 3-5 hours with energy packs which you can stock up on. Most free to play gatcha players also play more than one gatcha game. Personally I play F:GO and Arknights alternating primary depending on if a event is running.

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