While I never thought I’d become a gamer, I’m not special, just one of 190 million people in America who play video games. — Image by freepik
It’s the time of year where some of us are making New Year’s resolutions: perhaps to do more healthy things in 2025, or maybe what to do less of.
Most of us do have at least one guilty pleasure, right?
It’s something I’ve been thinking about as I have developed a recent guilty pleasure. But then, I came across a couple of women of some political heft who do what I have started to do. So maybe I shouldn’t feel so guilty, after all.
That’s playing games on our phones.
In early 2024, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen revealed her Candy Crush habit on National Public Radio’s Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, a news quiz show. And a few years back, US Rep. Brenda Lawrence of Michigan was caught playing the game during a State of the Union address. (True, playing games may not be appropriate at work.)
But I don’t play Candy Crush. You see, I’ve never been a gamer.
Nope, never had a GameBoy or PlayStation or any of that. Didn’t go to arcades. I wasn’t attracted to Candy Crush or Farmville. But recently, I started playing Wordle and brushing up on my French in the foreign language app Duolingo.
And, surprising to me, I have found myself playing two mobile games that tickle my brain before I go to sleep.
I wondered: Why do these games capture my attention, and why now, at this stage in my life?
Why we play video games
So I reached out to Bad Rhino, Kansas City’s largest gaming development studio. Bad Rhino does work for major games such as Fortnite and for developer Epic Games.
CEO and studio head Ryan Manning was curious about my newfound love for gaming, too.
“So as a developer that is a question I would absolutely love for you to unpack. I’d be like, what’s drawing you into the game?”
I tell myself that I’m trying to keep my brain active by exercising synaptic connections. Or maybe it’s just fun.
The game I find myself going to every night before bed is Get Color, which features a series of vials mixed with different colors that you must sort. The goal? To fill all the vials with the same color.
Manning explained what’s going on in my head from a developer’s standpoint. “There’s a reward to your labour ... and it’s fast, so you can do it over and over and over again, which is inherently more rewarding than spending six hours to make one color vial.”
He’s right about that.
The other game I sometimes play is Traffic Escape, a game of straightening out a bunch of yellow cars so that they go the way the arrows on their roofs indicate. Why I find a traffic jam relaxing is beyond me. At least I don’t get road rage in the game.
And because I’m, well, thrifty, I only play the free versions. That means I’m subjected to what feels like a million ads. Still, these games seem to relieve stress before I turn out the light and fall asleep.
While I never thought I’d become a gamer, I’m not special, just one of 190 million people in America who play video games.
Apparently, I like the immediate gratification. Maybe you do, too.
Digital Detox, a national organisation that promotes a better life-tech balance, believes there’s nothing wrong with that. Unless, of course, you can’t stop.
A Digital Detox newsletter post discussed why we keep playing. It’s the dopamine:
“These positive rewards keep people coming back to play and keep addicting games addicting. Just like drugs and alcohol provide people with a mind-altering high, these positive rewards in-game trigger a release of dopamine in your brain. This dopamine release isn’t necessarily a bad thing on its own but can become a problem if you can’t stop playing.”
Pollster organisation Civic Science reports that most people play because of stress or boredom. So goes my idea that I’m doing it to develop my brain.
According to Civic Science, “Escaping stress is one key driver of mobile gaming, but the most common motivation for playing mobile games – especially among respondents 45 and older – is to prevent or alleviate boredom.”
With Generation X and the large boomer generation in that age range, is that where we’re headed? Maybe.
Video game industry trends
Manning said industry trends in gaming are becoming less dedicated to a specific platform or console, “like where you go play Mario, which is a plumber that exists in a fantastical world building bricks and shooting fireballs. That is not where gaming currently is. Gaming is so accessible. There’s so many platforms that it’s released on. There’s so many different stories, experiences, subgenres that in gaming, you’re able to attract a much broader audience.”
And apparently that’s where I fit in, and some of you, too. Carmaletta M. Williams, CEO of the Black Archives of Mid-America in Kansas City, wrote in to tell me that she plays Words with Friends and Candy Crush saga “because they help me to decompress so I can sleep. I don’t often know who wins because that is not my goal.”
Manning doesn’t think Williams and I fit the role of traditional gamers.
“You’re finding your jam, you’re finding this new thing that’s like, ‘I actually enjoy it.’ So while it is gaming, it’s not gaming in the traditional sense of ... Call of Duty. There are so many more people getting into gaming that might not have traditionally considered themselves a ‘gamer’ before.”
OK, so, maybe it’s not a guilty pleasure. Maybe I just need to watch my screen time in 2025. Happy New Year, everyone. – The Kansas City Star/Tribune News Service
