Losing The Purpose of Entertainment

Lately, I have been thinking about why we do the things we do in our free time. There are a lot of discussions about avoiding boredom with doom scrolling on TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts, but I feel like there are other elements missing from this discussion.

For gaming, specifically with Roguelites and mobile games, we have seen the rise of games with amazing hooks and high replayability that can feel emotionally empty. Just as doom scrolling itches your brain to continue, these games create a similar loop. When you stand up after playing for 3-4 hours, you feel a weird sensation—you don't know how the time passed or what you actually accomplished. Yet, you still come back to it the next day. This is not new; we have always known people hooked on specific games for thousands of hours. In the past, these were mostly multiplayer games with strong social elements like MMORPGs or competitive 1-on-1 games like StarCraft. But with advanced technology and rapid content updates, developers have realized they do not need that multiplayer aspect to retain players anymore.

I realized a lot of these games have turned into checklists. You are always chasing some unlockable "thing" (a character, mechanic, or upgrade), and the main dopamine hit comes from getting the item, not the gameplay itself. You can easily identify these games by checking how often they reward you. If it takes just 15-30 minutes for every new unlock, it is likely designed around this schedule rather than intrinsic fun. A lot of mobile games, roguelites, and Gacha games rely on this dopamine hit (I won't even get into Battle passes, especially the FOMO-based ones filled with dark patterns). Eventually, when the unlockable "things" get farther apart, you feel burned out. You look back and feel an emptiness. You leave the game and rarely return. It was designed for high play time, not for fun. Since you do not earn these rewards in real life, all you have left is tens of hours spent. You do not feel relieved, less stressed, or inspired.

I feel like these trends feed off each other. I find I cannot play story-based games like I used to because the reward feels too far away. I do not feel an urge to play, which is ridiculous.

This trend stems from the value formula: Value = Time Spent / Money Spent.

You can see how mobile and free-to-play games break this formula. If you are under financial stress, this is often how you judge entertainment. Since it is easily calculable, we rely on this formula, even though it ignores the fun factor and the memorability factor. People love stories because we evolve with them; we see a new world and grow with it. But because these experiences are subjective, you cannot easily predict their "value" in a spreadsheet, while "time spent" is an obvious number.

To wrap up: there is cheap, easy-to-access entertainment, and then there is quality entertainment. To be a productive or mentally healthy person, we need quality entertainment because it pushes us to grow emotionally, recharge, or have real fun. But this is harder to access. For social games, you need to plan, which gets harder as you get older. For single-player experiences, they cost more (in patience or money) compared to the raw playtime they offer.

You can distinguish quality entertainment by feeling mentally energetic, inspired, or relaxed when you finish. If you feel mentally drained, unless it taught you something valuable, it was likely not a good piece of entertainment.

The challenge is that our brains do not naturally choose quality entertainment over the easy, cheap option. We need to be conscious of our choices and allow ourselves to be bored for a little while to find the motivation to chase quality experiences. This way, when we look back, we have happy memories and feel more fulfilled in our day-to-day lives.