Hacker News Reader

Comment by geocrasher | Hacker News Reader

There's an indie game called Deep Sixed that felt this way for me. The plot is that you're a prisoner and your cell is a spaceship that gets moved around for various reasons, and to stay alive you have to constantly fix your spaceship while also battling incoming baddies. It sounded like fun but when I played it I had a genuine stress response. It felt a lot like fixing broken servers while being screamed at on Twitter. I haven't been able to make myself play it since.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/591000/Deep_Sixed/

View on HN

MMORPGs can also give you this stress, especially ones where you are invested heavily into the experience. Spent some time on a MUD with actual roleplay and permadeath where people were crazy to the point where some would do all-nighters for intelligence stakeouts, battles, and other events. Many of the team leaders also set up a "hot pager" system so they could be quickly reached to assist while they were offline.

In moments when my character was near death I was often panicking and really feeling the tunnel vision of combat stress. The stakes were high in that a character and assets you spent over a year developing could be wiped out in an instant if you lost your focus. Eventually I couldn't take it and stopped playing.

On the other hand, there are games that are just straight up work - EVE is an example (haven't played it myself but do know people who do) and Rimworld if you play with an optimization/perfectionist mindset.

I played Dota for more than 10 years.

Besides the fact that I now have RSI (maybe not just due to Dota, possibly due to time spent in front of screen, overall), I realized after a while that I was a sort of people manager for 12-18 year olds and maybe I could just do the same thing at $DAYJOB and end up getting paid better :-)

One of the bizarre parts of these games is that you can effectively become a people manager as a 12-18 year old.

And if you're good enough, you can even get paid for it.

(Not well, mind you...)

and historically, hired at Yahoo when that meant something.

Ironically dealing with pub team psychology to get immature people to work together was good prep for being a manager in some ways.

>there are games that are just straight up work [...] if you play with an optimization/perfectionist mindset.

Does this apply only to certain (kinds of) games? Does it come from the way the game is structured?

Or does it have more to do with the community around it? For example RuneScape these days seems to be all about optimization, while back in the day it was more about exploration. (I guess for people who are still playing, there's nothing left to explore...)

you optimise what you have left when you have nothing else to do.

there is no exploring left in runescape, for the most part - virtually every corner and easter egg is effectively documented or reverse engineered in some way.

Yes, this. It reflects my experience of playing pokemon with friends, too.

It disappoints me. The usual result of any new game I am looking forward to is effectively first a massive private equity/VC funded pile of advertising and spam that exists to pay people to reverse engineer new games just to datamine it onto a wiki covered in advertising that is filled in by children desperately chasing the next bronze or silver contributor badge for having over 1k edits or some bs like that.

I'm now imagining an MMO game where these kids ends up on a mystic adventure to collect, deconstruct, and optimize otherworldly entities in order to collect badges and gain power. They're in a race against time to defeat a burnt out, disappointed emperor who wants to end the world. But plot twist, the final boss is a tyrannical monster symbolic of the self-destructive extrinsic desire for approval and recognition. Spoiler, the world does have to end, because there's a better one outside. The servers of the actual MMO itself are rigged to break on completion setting absolutely everyone free and leaving the lucky winner feeling like they earned a whole pile of clout but they won't be able to prove it because a deluge, thousands, of pre-planned counterfeit footage and testimonies of the game's end are disseminated IRL by the devs which will drown theirs out, and if they didn't keep records or lose them, ideally gaslight them into one day considering that maybe they didn't actually beat the game, maybe there was another ending, or something beyond it because there are some variants and truncations or extensions to the endings depicted. The devs make money by secretly recording proof of the real winner's true identity, and creates a collage of their adventure on a canvas, selling the result to a billionaire who thinks this whole thing is neat and was in the market for a unique way to launder money anyways.

And the billionaire they sold it to is the one who funded it to begin with. Money laundering complete.

Any game where you try to improve past a certain plateau becomes more like work imo, it requires deliberate practice.

I was speaking more about sandbox games in that regardless, like Rimworld and Factorio. The idea is that you focus too much on automation and efficiency rather than fun, and want to design your base in a "perfect" manner. Of course once you implement your design in production, you will see issues and want to optimize it more. And so on and on.

However as another commenter said, any game can become work if you want to achieve perfection. For example if you play an FPS game you can always shoot faster and more accurately - if you practice more and more. This can lead to a point where you don't find the game fun anymore.

I wound up having to quit playing Satisfactory at the final tier because no matter how I sliced it it was going to take a ton of time to accomplish.

It was either make an imperfect solution and let it run for a hundred hours, or spend a hundred hours optimizing a perfect solution and then letting that run for ten more hours, or something like that.

At that point, I just tapped out. Building my factory just stopped being fun at that point.

I had the same progression with sudoku. It's supposed to be fun. I stopped after writing a trivial solver.

I'm pretty sure it's just a feature of humans. Designing an RPG (and especially a competitive MMO) to be fun is really hard when min-maxers are involved. Once everything gets theorycrafted, everything is either optimal or trash, and anything optimal is an obligation. There's no such thing as a lucky drop, just a soul-sucking mandatory grind. Any choice (skill selection etc.) either affects the performance metric being optimized (and therefore the better-performing choice is mandatory) or it doesn't (and therefore it's pointless and why did the devs even bother).

I found myself doing this regardless of the game, but really wanting to enjoy the game without doing it.

Been playing MMOs since 2003 and in top raiding guilds/corps/etc since 2005, where this was highly rewarding.

Going without a computer (motherboard died) and having to quit MMOs for a while for economical reasons made me enjoy some single player games and heloed me fix this somewhat.

The legendary GDC talk, The Prototype that was Banned from Halfbrick, describes the unpleasant adversarial effects of some multiplayer games like this, and how they can escalate to be really unpleasant experiences for all involved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9WMNuyjm4w

Wow. Have never seen this. Thanks for the link!

> On the other hand, there are games that are just straight up work

I'm getting Victoria 2 flashbacks just reading this sentence...

Satisfactory and Factorio do that for me. Really good games but i can barely bring myself to play them with how quickly they start making me feel like i'm working.

Wish there was an.. easy mode, or something. Something that let me enjoy that feeling of my work - which i love - but with some simplifications to not exercise the same parts of my brain i'm trying to rest after a long days actual work hah.

Who knows, maybe it would be boring :shrug:

For Factorio: 1. Turn off biters (or turn on "peaceful mode", which mostly lets you ignore them until you want to start dealing with them) 1a. Dragon's Teeth wall design 2. Grab one of the quick start mods so you start with a backpack of construction robots 3. City blocks

After that it's down (and up) to you. I've been able to play Factorio like it's I'm gardening - where I'm just chilling, poking at the puzzles - and other times I haven't been, even when I've got the biter problem resolved, and I'm doing what you described.

Thanks for the tips.

> I've been able to play Factorio like I'm gardening

On gardening, same advice would apply: choosing low maintenance, well fitted with the climate or “tough” species is underrated.

Going only for the visual aspect will easily make gardening a second job. Except it’s an actual living thing, and it’s more pressure than the bullshit deadline we have on our projects.

Ayy, that's fair. The prior owners set things up very nicely, so between that and other things, most of my gardening is "optional", which makes it very very nice; and many of the plants are forgiving / masochists (vines and roses).

Step 1: Learn how to trim new plant (holy crap they're algorithmic fractals!). Step 2: Start trimming new plant. Step 3: Go stare at newly-prior plant a few minutes a day, see how it's doing. 10/10 would recommend.

I think for a lot of games it helps to tune them the way you want to play. For Factorio I like to turn the biters to easy mode, add some convenience mods like ranged grabbing etc.

But after that I like to "speedrun" the game to see how quickly I can launch the rocket. My best time is only about 11-12 hours, so it's far off any kind of world record time, but it makes the game a lot more fun when I have a goal in mind, instead of just endlessly optimizing etc.

I don't know, I would expect turning off biters to make the temptation for hardcore optimization much worse!

They add chaos and something else to focus on and if they're making things too hard then you can adjust the difficulty.

I used to feel that way, but eventually figured out a set of design principles that took care of the parts of the game that were stressing me out. Turning off biters, building with a main bus, making a mall for yourself, and building with extra space so you can hack easily will go a long way to reducing the "ahh I'm gonna have to redesign this whole thing" stress.

Sudoku is that for me. Feels exactly like work, but perfectly balanced where is hard enough to be interesting and easy enough to be fun.

Sudoku is so one of those fiddly and error prone tasks much better performed by computer for me.

I wrote a computer solver for Sudoku and that was enough for me, I feel no need to ever play again ;-)

That's really cool! And if you are trying just to beat the puzzle it would make sense to automate the task.

I play ALOT of Sudoku and the game now for me is optimizing my own thoughts while I play. Moving from a random search and find function, to a structure queries that solve the puzzles quicker and quicker. Sort of like a rubix cube. I focus on beating my best time and making it easier and easier.

I used to feel this way too, but I found sudoku varients a lot more enjoyable. If you look up the YouTube channel "Cracking the Cryptic" they have a lot of different ones.

Yes - after I got bored of regular Sudoku, I found "Killer Sudoku" and I've been playing that variant regularly for a long time. The hard puzzles (blank with no "easy" parts) in the killer variant are quite challenging, and over a span of years I've continued to gain new insights into better techniques for finding the answers. The logical chains you have to build up just to eliminate one possible number somewhere really stretch the brain! More often they're merely tough and I can solve them in one sitting in under half an hour. It's a great mental warmup in the morning with coffee, to get the brain juices going!

You might enjoy KenKen puzzles as well. They are similar to Sodoku but involve more math. I find them to be very fun, although the harder ones can start to feel like work.

I kinda have the same feeling when speedrunning Unlimited Wordle [0].

[0]: https://tck.mn/speedle

Whenever I play Rimworld, I turn off invasions and make all of my colonists androids [0]. I just want to build things.

[0] https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=13864128...

Depending on what you want to build, have you tried Space Engineers? (Very different from Rimworld, though.)

I have! I love it but it's very tedious. The controls are just much clunkier than Minecraft (for example). It's been a couple years since I played it though, maybe it has improved a lot.

Yes with Satisfactory especially. The hard part for me is keeping track of goals. I'll start playing with the mindset of "I'm going to finish this factory" and then I'll run out of resources. So on the trip to get more resources I find 5 other things starting to go sideways so I have to start fixing that instead.

I found that playing multiplayer made that experience much better.

The smaller sidetracks are more satisfying knowing others won't have to deal with them, and if others are doing the same thing they're less frequent allowing you to tackle the larger goals more often.

I tried both of these and had the same response.

Something that did work as "fun" for me was Infinifactory, even though thematically the game is all about it being a job, it's puzzle nature is less daunting than being a sheer optimization problem.

That, and the incredible "Create Mod" for Minecraft, which gives you all sorts of mechanical gizmos. I find it more interesting because building a machine that does something is the primary focus, instead of linking machines together optimally, and the fact that your automations help you achieve the other open-ended goals of Minecraft

I tried Factorio a few months ago and after my initial shock with the quality of the game being so high, I found myself falling into optimization mode.

And then it quickly turned into a second job. I had to decided whether I wanted to devote time to Factorio optimization problems, or ...anything else in life.

I chose life :)

Nice Trainspotting reference. Very apropos.

At least with Satisfactory - there is absolute no rush. No time pressure for any part of the game that I'm aware of.

Now there's always something I want to be doing, but that's another problem.

Factorio feels definitely like this to me.

It's an amazing game. It felt very stimulating the first few hours. Then it became work, and now I don't think I will ever start it anymore.

When I saw the title, I thought it was going to be about Factorio. Bottlenecks never go away, they only move. That's systems engineering.

I love both of those games but recently took on Dyson Sphere Program after it was gifted to me. I quickly put in twice as many hours as I had in Factorio. There is no combat, it's beautiful, and the blueprint system makes it less tedious. Most of the complaints I have about it are nit-picks and at $20 on Steam, it is absolutely worth the price of admission.

patio11 has done more than one twitter thread about enjoying Dyson Sphere Program.

(it's not sort of my thing but if it's your sort of thing I suspect his endorsement is more relevant)

Huh - I tried and quit before the blueprint system was implemented. Maybe it's time to return...

"'just enjoy it and don't think' is for those who don't understand what a joy it is to think."

If you're the type of person enjoying a game that is like work but without productivity, "fun" and "mindless" are contradictory attributes. Don't fight yourself. The thinking is the enjoyable part.

I felt this way about an indie game that was actually very well received (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_Metro_(video_game)), and it was fun for a while, but it quickly grew old: the graphics are rudimentary (not expecting AAA-level stuff of course, but still, simple monochrome vector graphics get boring pretty fast), the gameplay is wildly unrealistic (stations popping up out of nowhere that you have to connect to lines which you can instantly change, even erase and rebuild everything, ad infinitum, trains that can be instantly teleported to a completely different line when needed etc.), and every game inevitably gives you a sense of failure, because sooner or later your network is swamped with passengers and collapses. So not really realistic, but the need to constantly optimize the network while the game keeps throwing spanners in your works quickly felt like drudgery. For some time I kept coming back because of the daily challenges and other stuff designed to keep things interesting, but after about one month I decided enough is enough and uninstalled it.

I enjoyed the game for a short while too, I was taking it as having some resemblance of urban planning for the real cities, and getting to redesign some of the terribly inefficient system of cities that I've lived in and others that I greatly admire and try to emulate. Later I just found this is almost random and has not much to do with the actual traffic flow of those cities, it just became an optimization game with increasing difficulty level. That's when I started feeling the "work" element and never went back.

Agreed. I stopped playing that yesterday when I realised the level for my city had nothing to do with my city.

Kind of put me off all Apple Arcade games honestly.

I enjoyed both Metro and the newer Motorways. But inevitably I uninstall them when you realize that at some point at your skill level it just becomes luck as to what items pop out where. With great luck you can easily double the score on a bad luck map.

Do you think your age and life (work) experience did that for you? I have noticed myself feeling considerably differently towards different games too. Games I used to enjoy (like Starcraft) back in the days, I enjoy a lot less as an older guy now and having worked for almost 2 decades. It takes a lot of mental effort to keep up and do well (macro-ing and managing my econ, also micro-ing my army, etc.). Whereas if I play some Fortnite with friends (as a 40 year-old...) it's just pretty relaxing overall and I still enjoy gaming that way.

That's an interesting comment. I loved Starcraft as a kid. Played many hours every day. I'm now 33 and never got into Starcraft 2. Nowadays the idea is utterly unappealing. I just play the occasional Call of Duty Warzone (similar to Fortnite) and it's fun.

I feel the same. Starcraft used to be what I would consider a 'light' game. As a teen I got big into the grognard strategy wargames, the kind with over 1000 units and >300 page rule books and very detailed simulation of everything. That and 4X games like Civilization and Alpha Centauri. So much planning and managing and problem-solving through epically long and large games.

Nowadays, in my 40s, it's things like Fortnite (my current favorite), Subnautica, and European/American Truck Simulator. Games where I can just relax and play and not have to do much thinking.

That's a great question. It was work experiences that transformed a challenge into a stressful slog. There are some things in my work history that elicit a PTSD-like response. For example, right now I'm thinking of a software product that I used to have to administer on about 60 servers, and I can feel myself tightening up and almost feeling nauseous. This isn't related to my original comment but answers your question I think. My work experience definitely informed my preference toward games. I like problem solving and expressing creativity. But doing so under pressure is the opposite of fun for me, which is why that game was no-go for this greying geek.

In a life imitates art moment, I watched the story from the trailer for that game (the character ends up in the cell after being held criminally liable for a mistake at work due to complacency), and then saw this headline in another open browser tab:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/03/25/1088902...

My wife (who is an experienced nurse) told me about that case this morning. She has mixed feelings, but is not terribly sympathetic. This person should not be working in the profession, that seems clear. In jail, I don't know. Is there such a thing as "criminally incompetent"?

If you deceive people into giving you responsibilities you're incapable of dealing with, and it brings meaningful harm to others, it can be criminal. There are regulations for legal, medical, and financial services to criminalize that deceit and prevent that kind of situation.

Why is the nurse criminally negligent, but not the company or programmers which made the software that runs the automated medicine cabinet? Or the hospital administration who failed to recognize and do something to correct the systemic problem of why constant "overrides" are needed to complete normal tasks?

Edit: maybe drug companies are even partly responsible for confusing names & the whole system of generic versus trade names (as it seems this incident wouldn't have happened if the generic name were the only name by which the substance was known).

I'm not saying any of the above should be. I just think we should compare and contrast the medical profession with aviation. The reason the accident rate is so low in commercial aviation is a systems approach to safety. In the medical profession it's all about machismo and individual responsibility - which doesn't lead to continual improvement as an industry.

You are correct. Robert Wachter has written a lot on this (see his The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age) and it's a common error to simply blame someone like a nurse for administering the incorrect medicine as opposed to seeing how that situation came to be. Healthcare has a lot to learn from how similar things are investigated in the aviation industry (note: that doesn't mean nurses get absolved of everything, just that even apparently insanely stupid mistakes are often the result of swiss-cheese style errors).

> While you're busy putting out fires, please don't forget to buy new parts, to continue your assigned mission and if you could also take care of those aliens attacking the lower ring that would be lovely.

Hmm, yeah. I wonder where I’ve heard that before.

Lost Ark was recently released into the US market by Amazon / Smilegate and is getting some negative feedback due to the casino-like elements to the game. Some people just don't want a slot machine simulator, but if you're the publisher who wants to extract maximum revenue from players, then Skinner boxes are apparently the way to go. The player can buy their way past randomness by either purchasing material that increases their chances of winning, or gives them more chances to play. So despite complaints I doubt that mechanic will go anywhere.

My experience with an all-stress game is Papers, Please. Between the pressures of the government bureaucracy, the time stressor and the plight of the poor people you have to crush... it's exhausting.

Crushing poor people was the reason I quit that game and some similar other games.

I feel this way about a lot of games, to be honest. There's so much side-quest filler that feels like work to me (a first play through of one of the Far Cry games had me crafting a wallet or some such nonsense) that it's become quite off-putting. As a teenager with nothing but time, I probably wouldn't have cared, but as a grown man with a full time job and little time to spend on video games, the last thing I want to do is feel like I'm working.

We can learn a lot from digging into our stress responses. Changing it is much harder, but learning is a start.

Somewhat related, I remember Space Colony, where you had to manage an eponymous Space Colony, which not only involved assigning jobs to people, but also looking after their mental health.

This was one of my favorite games as a kid. I don't even want to think about how many hours I put into it.

Holy shit this is exactly what I'm looking for! Thanks.

Which servers are you responsible for? Just curious

Look for the smoke. Those.

haha That was funny

I work in the web hosting industry. At one point in my career I was answering social media and taking the technical lead in fixing minor server issues. There's a reason I call Twitter "The Little Blue Bird of Hate."

That is a lot of pressure. Glad you made it out of that spot.

Agreed, and Thanks! :) Me too. To be fair even at that employer it was a temporary thing, mostly because of the amount of stress it caused.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com