Longstanding conventional wisdom suggests that if you’re playing a game, and you intend to stop, but you succumb to the fallacy of “Well, just one more turn,” and then several hours pass, it’s a good game! After all, how else would something be able to sink its hooks so indelibly into your psyche? But while compulsion can be a sign of transcendent craft, it isn’t always. On this week’s Aftermath Hours, we talk about what happens when it’s not.
We convene on the eve – if we’re measuring in podcast time – of my book release (Stream Big, available wherever books are sold) to talk mostly about other stuff. First up, Activision and former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick got into dustups with CWA, the union that represents over 1,000 workers across Microsoft and Activision, with Kotick claiming that harassment suits against Activision Blizzard were “fake,” engineered to juice CWA membership. Meanwhile, over here in the real world, CWA is working to get an Activision employee his job back after he was fired (allegedly) for talking about guns… at the company that makes Call of Duty. Hmmmm.
Then we move on to Civilization VII, which Luke has many, many thoughts about, none of them positive. The game feels distinctly unfinished, he says – a sign of the times when even such a ubiquitous series no longer commands the time and resources necessary to emerge from the oven fully baked.
After that, Chris tells us about a thing that rules: Lies of P, the Pinocchio-themed Bloodborne-like that’s receiving DLC in the near future. Then we wrap it up by talking about our favorite interview moments, some of which might tie into my book (what are the odds?).
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that Luke can design the perfect 4X strategy game, and I can shut up about my book forever.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Nathan: I think you said this, as have some reviews: Civilization VII still has that Civ quality of making you want to play it for very long periods of time – of being very compulsive. But where’s the line between that compulsiveness and it being enjoyable to play?
Luke: This is something that I’ve come to learn playing this game in particular: “One more turn” is kind of Civ’s unofficial battlecry – like “Oh, this game is so good, you always want to click one more turn.” That’s a psychological ploy that all 4X games can use. Even the bad ones. They’ve all got that pull, and it’s not because the game’s good. It’s like a slot machine. It’s like being stuck at a table at a casino. You’re not necessarily enjoying what you’re doing, but you’ve been manipulated into clicking one more turn each time, because each time you click one more turn, a couple numbers go up or something else moves or changes.
The point isn’t that you’re clicking one more turn; the point is, are you enjoying yourself while you’re doing it? I got very tired of Civ VI a year or two down the line, but this is the first Civ where after a week, I was tired of it. I found myself playing games where I was clicking through one more turn and being like “I’m not enjoying this, but I’m clicking one more turn because I’m in that honeypot of the genre.”
I really wish we would stop speaking about it positively, as though on its own merits clicking one more turn is a badge of honor that you’ve made a good video game. It’s not. It’s a pulling mechanism that the whole genre is able to employ. Millenia, Humankind, and games that are nowhere near as good as Civ still have that in them. And so people that talk about this Civ having that like it’s got the juice? It doesn’t mean that this game’s got the juice. Because you walk away from four hours playing this game, and you’re like “Ugh, what did I do just now? I could have done something else. That wasn’t fun. That wasn’t enjoyable.”
Nathan: That’s so interesting because I think it mirrors a lot of other elements of modern culture. I feel the same way when I use something like TikTok. I’ll scroll, one video after another, for many hours. Two or three or even four. And then I’ll be like “What did I spend that time doing?” It’s a blank space in my mind because it was all so compulsive but also unmemorable. That’s the attention economy in a nutshell. It’s meant to absorb your time and your attention, but it’s not meant to imprint on you any further than that.
Luke: Are we crediting Sid Meier with the creation of the attention economy? With Civilization in 1991?
Nathan: Yep, that was his goal with the first design document back in the day: “It’s gonna lead to something called TikTok, and it’s gonna fuck everyone.”
Luke: “You won’t even need the games anymore.”
Chris: I just thought of the idea of, like, a gacha version of Civilization with MiHoYo-style waifus and shit.
