This past weekend found me throwing 12 hours of my life at a Facebook-level, free-to-play, strategy game. I fell for the pretty visuals and interesting premise. It turns out to be dumb as rocks and a waste of brain space, but I plodded through to level 20 'cause I adore accruing meaningless experience points.
Drift0r on YouTube posted a good video sharing his thoughts on free-to-play titles. While you don't invest money, you do invest your time. Every minute you spend in a match or collecting resources is a minute you've donated to that game's developers.
"Free" is a ridiculous concept. Everything has a cost. We fear costs of money, sometimes of opportunity, and rarely of time. Large investments appear greater and more fearsome than they really are; small, bite-sized donations seem trivial, but add up quickly.
Once again, I'm learning it's not how much you have, it's how you use it.
It's so hard to view time as a resource because it essentially "spends" itself. We lose it continuously at a fixed rate, and since we have no control over this we are taught not to value it in many instances. We do things to pass time or kill time, and while that's viable to a degree (there are real instances [waiting in line, etc.] where we can't really be doing anything "productive with the time being spent) it ends up hurting us because that mindset easily bleeds over into other aspects of our lives (or at least it does for me).
ReplyDeleteExactly. Comes back to the argument against multitasking. "One thing at a time."
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