Comfortably Numb

Games understand the human experience of boredom as well as any psychologist

The games that understand the human experience of boredom as well as any psychologist

Here, against an endless horizon of orange sand, progress is practically eternal. You can drive for hours, chugging at a constant 45mph towards a notional Las Vegas with almost no change in the scenery. Or you can drive for hours, hitting the ball into hole after hole across forever-undulating topography. Desert Bus and Desert Golfing

are boring games. They’re designed to be numbingly repetitive; they do not reward us with showers of praise or nuggets of story, nor do you find new places to go and new things to do. And yet we play them. We even celebrate them, basing charity events around Desert Bus For Hope – and

Desert Golfing got a sequel.

For a medium that’s meant to be about excitement, games can coast awfully close to boredom at times. While Desert Bus and

Desert Golfing intentionally play with the notion of being as boring as possible, there are also slow games which trade on the passing of time, like Animal Crossing,

games which eke out rewards day by day. Then there are games about grinding repetitive actions for XP and low-drop-rate items. There are games about watching numbers go up; games about waiting for cooldowns to finish.

These ideas aren’t just common, they’ve become an integral part of modern game design, which routinely promises hundreds of hours of playtime stretched out across months or years. There’s Destiny 2’s sprawling drip-fed economy, which asks you to kill hundreds of gribblies a day in order to earn incremental opportunities to buy a chance to win a good gun or piece of armour. There are the mobile game grindfests, from Puzzle & Dragons on down, which wring aeons of time from matchthree puzzle mechanics. There’s Clash Of Clans, which strings every action out across hours and days to prolong the experience while encouraging you to buy boosts.

All this is to say that game developers know a lot about boredom: how to skate across its ocean, generating the greatest engagement from the least content that it’s economically viable for a studio to produce. They also know how to use boredom as a medium in itself; how to pace the spaces between excitement and how it can be the mother of creativity. They know how to crush boredom so well that games are extraordinarily good at inspiring obsession and compulsion in their players; designers know how we respond to boredom so well that they often have to rein in their command of it. In fact, it’s quite possible that a game designer instinctively knows as much about the human experience of boredom as a psychologist.

But Erin Westgate, director of the Florida Social Cognition And Emotion Lab at the University Of Florida, who specialises in researching boredom, says that videogames aren’t really seen as a place to study it. “Boredom researchers are not looking at videogames and not finding work related to games, but a lot of the principles are similar. For instance, I’ve seen a couple of dissertations and projects about the idea of using the concept of flow to structure videogames, and flow is the least bored you could ever be, right?”

Flow theory, which inspired thatgamecompany co-founder and creative director Jenova Chen’s synonymous first game, is the idea that you can induce a trance-like sense of deep immersion and focus by pitching a game’s difficulty level at a precise balancing point between what a player finds challenging and easy. And it just so happens that flow theory fits neatly into one of the two models which contemporary psychology uses to describe our experience of boredom.

Attentional boredom is the boredom we feel when an activity is either too easy or too hard and we disengage from it, our attention having lapsed. This is the kind of boredom that leads to frustration and agitation: we want something out of a game – the moment-to-moment thrill of control, to achieve a goal that we’ve been set – but we’re being blocked from experiencing it because the game is too hard (it’s over-stimulating us) or too easy (it’s under-stimulating). Flow is the antithesis to this kind of boringness, a state in which an activity is toeing the line between under- and over-stimulation.

Games have been celebrated (and fretted about) managing to create this state of encompassing attention since their earliest days, when writer David Sudnow, in his classic 1979 book Pilgrim In The Microworld, described spending two weeks repeatedly nearly clearing Breakout’s first screen: “Atari had me hooked… Thirty seconds of play, for three bricks, and I’m on a whole new plane of being, all synapses wailing as I’m poised there with paddle, ball, a few remaining lights on screen, and a history that made this my first last brick.”

Games manage our attention with design sleights-of-hand which have become so fundamental that they’re now inherent components of various genres. “Things like hunger and exhaustion and limited inventory size in RPGs, they’re very important to get people back to town to break up the combat,” says David Brevik, co-designer of Diablo and currently making a sandbox RPG called It Lurks Below. “They make you step away from combat to think about your items, sell some stuff and do other things so there’s more to the game than the moment-tomoment adrenaline rush of killing gobs of monsters. It’s important to go back and forth between downtime and intense-time. If you don’t, the action becomes boring because it becomes repetitive and samey.”

It’s not easy to add constraints like this, because as psychologists Robert Troutwine and Edgar O’Neal have shown, constraint

can make you feel more bored if it’s preventing you from escaping a situation in which you’re already bored. “If I force you to watch a really fantastic movie, you’ll enjoy it just as much as if you were freely choosing the movie,” says Westgate. “But if I force you to watch a really boring movie, feeling you were forced to do it makes it even more boring.” So games have to be careful about forcing players to give their dungeon crawling a rest: the town has to introduce new sources of interest with interesting decisions over what to sell or how to upgrade gear.

Brevik agrees: it’s vital that the player always feels free. “Freedom is about giving the player control so they’re making decisions they want to make, even if it’s an illusion. They feel they’re guiding their character through the world and they’re doing the things they want to do their way.”

For strategy games, pacing between intensity and downtime takes the form of modulating the weight of decisions the player is having to make. “You can’t feel every decision wins or loses the game,” says Civilization IV, Offworld Trading Company and Old World designer

Soren Johnson. “It can really wear you out to feel you’re always one move from disaster.” Instead, he suggests designing a strategy game to give the player lots of little decisions that lead to a big one – although while making Old World, his newest grand strategy game, he found himself rethinking this principle as he designed its technology system.

Typically in Civ-like games, technologies are arranged in a tree, so that animal husbandry leads to mounted soldiers. Committing to go down a branch is a weighty initial decision, but the succeeding decisions tend to be trivial because they’re what naturally follows. “And that’s fine,” says Johnson. But Old World presents its technologies differently: you choose to research one from a set of randomised cards. The ones you rejected go into a discard pile so you know you won’t get to choose them next time, making each technology decision weighty. “And that’s appropriate because you only make these decisions every three or four turns. That’s what I hope is good pacing.”

Frank Lantz, director of New York University Game Center and co-designer of mobile puzzle classic Drop7, agrees, noting the way that pacing can play a strong – and surprising – role in creating a sense of fun that can transcend formal principles of game design. “I love Michael Brough,” he says. “His 868-HACK is never boring. Every step is interesting, there’s never a default choice, never an easy way to apply a simple heuristic [a rule of thumb which you know always works in a certain situation]. I’m aways engaged with the juicy part of the watermelon. If you let your attention waver for a second you’re going to miss something important. It’s beautiful. And then Imbroglio comes along, and it has this rhythm where there’s lots of time when you’re grinding. There are also moments of intense decision-making, when everything matters. And there are moments when you’re in-between and feel you’re driven by a general heuristic. And as a result, there are ways that 868-HACK is a better game, but there are ways that Imbroglio is more fun, and is therefore maybe a better game because of that.”

So what’s going on here? “In part what game developers may be doing with pacing may partially be preventing adaptation and habituation,” says Westgate. She points towards what psychologists call ‘the hedonic treadmill’, the idea that things we enjoy don’t bring us happiness for very long because we get used to them. The AREA model, created by Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert, theorises that in order to adapt to a new situation, such as a challenge thrown up by a game we’re playing, we must Attend to it, React to it, Explain it and then Adapt to it.

“It would suggest that anything designers can do to prevent that process will prolong enjoyment, either by making the events themselves rare, or by preventing people’s ability to explain or make sense of the exact mechanics,” says Westgate. And corroborating her suggestion, games are great at obscuring the way they work, using randomness and other forms of unpredictability to keep us guessing about how best to play them. Because when we’ve ‘solved’ a game – when there’s no question about what action we should take next – it becomes boring.

Game designers know, however, that we humans will do a lot to avoid unpredictability. Raph Koster, in his 2005 book A Theory Of Fun put it like this: “The destiny of games is to become boring, not to be fun. Those of us who want games to be fun are fighting a losing battle against the human brain because fun is a process and routine is its destination.”

Johnston encountered a practical demonstration of this principle when he and his team at Firaxis started to design Civilization IV. They looked at the way many players of Civ III would fiddle with placing their citizens in different tiles each turn in order to maximise their output and prevent wastage of overflow production. Civ III’s systems quietly encouraged attentional boredom: rote decisions and repetitive actions which served to slow down the game and distracted players from the more exciting bigger picture. “Players will optimise the fun out of games,” says Johnson. “There’s an infinite rabbit hole for arranging specialists, and ultimately, as long as there’s no downside to players fiddling in a turn-based game, even if it’s just a one per cent advantage, they’ll keep fiddling with it. Just their perception that they need to drives them.” So for Civ IV,

they mitigated it by allowing overflow population growth and production to go into the next project.

In dealing with problems like this, game designers come up against some of the ethical questions around how games take up players’ time. Mindful of Civ’s notoriety for devouring time, Johnson thinks a lot about how long it takes to play his games and he’s designed Old World to take a maximum of 20 hours. He considers removing repetitive or rote mechanics, such as Civ-style diplomacy, which tends to involve repeated speculative visits to each leader to try deals in the hope of finding a bargain. Instead, you have to send ambassadors to rival cities, only finding out turns later about the results.

Johnson says he’s thinking about attentional boredom here, but he’s also engaging with the second psychological model of boredom, which is about meaningfulness. When an activity doesn’t quite meet the value we expect to get out of it, it loses our attention. Perhaps the cost of doing it feels too high compared to what we think it will deliver in return (such as that tedious Destiny 2 daily bounty in which you need to kill lots of enemies with a scarce-ammo linear fusion rifle). Perhaps we’ve realised there’s no reward for exploring an area of the map we just ventured into. Perhaps the thing we’re doing is too abstract, asking us to play with actions and variables to which we can’t personally relate.

There’s a good deal of argument among psychologists about the relative importance of meaningless and attentional boredom, but Westgate argues that you can’t separate them – they combine in different ways with strange effects, so that under-stimulating tasks which should feel boring can be transfixing if they have strong meaning.

For Lantz, this is where things get interesting, because boredom becomes part of an aesthetic experience and therefore a medium in itself. He points toward the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, director of the films Solaris and Stalker. “He’ll hold shots for longer than you’d expect. You wonder why he’s holding it; you look around. Am I missing something? Your brain rebels – enough, enough! – and then you break through, and you’re in a place where no film has taken you, because Tarkovsky has made you sit in a place we call boredom and now you’re in a new state, more receptive to detail and texture and the moment, in a way you’d never be able to experience in Die Hard or Fast & Furious.”

Johnson worries about how players invest in time-heavy tasks. “I definitely focus a lot on attentional boredom. That’s inherent in a game designer, especially one who focuses on mechanics, but making sure you have meaning, I think I should think about that a lot more.” He’s being hard on himself, because his games are drenched in potential meaning – in Old World you play a ruler of the Classical world and ride the vicissitudes of history in your attempt to find glory for your dynasty. But there’s a sense in which the Civilization series uses meaning as a prop: “There’s always a point in Civ where, no matter how good the design is, you realise you’ve got five hours of fairly boring decisions to make, but it’s worth it because you want to launch the spaceship to Alpha Centauri or whatever. That greater goal covers up for the fact there’s a lot of boredom in the latter part of the game.”

Another place in games where these two models come together in surprising ways is in grinding, the hours of repetitive actions that many games ask of their players. “Grinding is fascinating to me,” says Westgate. “There’s this debate in the boredom world about how meaningfulness and attention intertwine, and my impression is that they’re independent causes. We now have evidence to support that, but part of the reason I theorised it was my World Of Warcraft experience of grinding. I used to play a hunter, and I’d go into the woods with my pet and kill 10,000 whatever it was. It was not attentionally engaging; it was way too easy. And it wasn’t intrinsically meaningful. But there was this idea that what I was doing had value and it was reliably rewarded. Every action was a clear and measurable step; I had to do it a thousand times but there was no ambiguity. In a game there’s a contract: if you do this meaningless thing a thousand times there’s a guaranteed payoff, and that can be meaningful.”

So, what of payoffs? Better weapons and armour, new abilities and more resources are typical rewards that add meaning to boring tasks. Another is story. Jake Hollands was inspired to make his incremental idle game Spaceplan in 2017 by Cookie Clicker, which sees you amassing vast stockpiles of cookies which you invest in even faster ways of generating cookies. Hollands was fascinated by it: a game which doesn’t deliver challenge, instead delivering a constant sense of progression while telling a story. For Spaceplan he wanted to explore building a stronger story, so in it you uncover the mystery of why Earth has been destroyed, which gives greater meaning to your spiralling generation of potatoes, and it even has an ending to underline the consequence of the events you’ve followed.

This summer, Hollands released Tale Of Crows, an idle game that dives deeper into storytelling, on Apple Arcade. “Between Spaceplan and Tale Of Crows I spent a lot of time experimenting with ways of losing that clicking mechanic. It’s really difficult to replace it. I’m not entirely sure we’ve done it in Tale Of Crows but I think I’m getting closer.” In Tale Of Crows you, as Lord Commander of Game Of Thrones’ Night’s Watch, send out crows to carry

messages to expeditions in the far snowy reaches beyond the Wall and wait actual minutes and hours for them to return with your brothers’ responses.

“I wanted to drop the clicking because it’s the key thing that gets someone hooked and they don’t put it down, because it gives them the option of constantly progressing and tapping that button gets you closer, faster,” says Hollands. “What I want to do is for it the game to sit next to someone’s life so they can check in every five minutes on something they’re excited for without it being an active distraction.” So Tale Of Crows tells you to put the game down, assuring you that things will progress outside your active attention.

Hollands says that the response has been mixed. It’s not surprising: he said himself we like to feel we’re involved in the things happening in a game. Clicking in Cookie Clicker is soon largely superseded by the bakeries you’ll buy to generate them automatically, but since it’s a big thing in the middle of the screen, you’ll click it a lot anyway. Westgate notes a new study which told two subjects that they’d get a dollar if they watched a five-minute video of a pavement. In front of them was a button. Each subject was aware that every time they pressed the button, the other subject would have 10 cents docked from their pay. “People were more likely to press the button when they were doing this boring thing.”

Think about tapping on the N64 pad’s big green A to have Link roll across Hyrule Field in Ocarina Of Time, or the way you tend to bunnyhop around Los Santos: when our attention isn’t being fulfilled we tend to interact with what we can, regardless of function. “The study wasn’t entirely depressing,” Westgate continues. “If you put a second button that adds money to the other subject’s pay, the effect goes away. People just want to press something.”

But while Hollands wanted to avoid compulsion, he also liked Cookie Clicker for its capacity to soothe and transport him from his own experience of depression. It’s customary to celebrate games that reward skill and clever thinking, but we’re increasingly understanding how repetition and apparently mindless actions in games can be meditative, a quality which Raph Koster admits he entirely missed from including in the original A Theory Of Fun and added to its 2013 second edition. “People pointed out that sometimes they play a game as a meditation device or an extremely low-stakes activity that they can turn off their brain for and do by rote. That’s not the same thing I was writing about originally, so I added a section on ways in which people play that aren’t about fun, which also means ways people play that may actually be boring.”

Westgate says there’s not much research into the relationship between meditation and boredom, but she reminds us, “We use ‘boring’ as a catchphrase for not much going on. Someone relaxing on a beach wouldn’t say they’re bored. Someone playing a low-key game isn’t bored.” A better way to look at our experience of boredom, she says, is to consider the frame of mind we’re taking into an activity. We’re not always feeling energised and looking for something with a high grade of challenge that demands all our attention.

“Grinding – on the one hand, it’s a pejorative term and we look down on games with it, but in other cases it’s what we want,” explains Lantz. “There’s something beautiful in grinding, in repetition, about the trance-like state that a ‘boring’ game is capable of bringing us into. The comfort, or the meditative state that it puts us in, can be a value which can be rich and meaningful.”

Westgate points out the role of culture in attitudes to boredom, since different cultures value different states of being. “In Western culture, the ideal feeling people say they want is a rush of excitement, of going down a rollercoaster. But when you ask people from Eastern cultures – Japan, south-east Asia – they tend to describe the ideal state as calm and relaxed. Something I’ve noticed anecdotally is that in the West, calm and relaxing experiences are seen as boring.”

Boredom, therefore, is not an absolute. It’s fickle and fleeting, it takes many forms, and isn’t even something to avoid. In all their many forms, games are built on this understanding, using boredom to inspire us, to support our desires, to express different ideas and to lend them different textures. “You get this pushback, this question of how videogames can ever be meaningful; the idea that they’re completely pointless,” says Westgate. “No, meaning is whatever is important to you in the moment, whether it’s something big or small. We experience meaning when something lines up with our values and goals. The more value a goal has, the more meaning it has for us in that moment. Videogames excel at creating that feeling.”

“A person’s background is so important, it’s why no game is for everyone,” agrees Koster, highlighting the changing appeal of noughts and crosses: how it can absorb children until they understand its simplicity, whereupon its meaning drops away. And so we play Desert Golfing, marvelling at the cactus which appears at hole 316 and the stone at 537, and we play Desert Bus, holding the slightly off-centre steering to keep in lane for mile after mile, because it’s extraordinary that anyone should conceive of making a game like this. Maybe they won’t hold us for long, but they’re precious while they do. “The capacity to feel boredom is a fabulous gift,” says Lantz. “We’re the brainiacs of the animal kingdom and boredom is somehow deeply related to what makes us human.”