One of the discussions in class this week pertained to the idea of “wasted time”, which Ashtrick defined to be the time spent on a clicker game after you had gotten the point. What is this notion of “wasted time”? It stems from the idea of a lost opportunity cost: the time you spent playing a game where you could have been doing something else, could have been generating value in some way. Hodge talks about this desire, this contemporary craving to constantly be generating value, to always be active:
“Many more digital habits are primarily phatic: checking email incessantly, scrolling social media newsfeeds or waterfall displays, gaming during moments of micro-boredom, swiping left and right again and again, and even just the urge to pull out a phone for no reason other than to unlock the screen and check, well, whatever. These ostensibly “active” practices seem to reinforce the reigning characterization of digital subjectivity as at least vaguely purposeful and driven by a need for “productive” intersubjective or personal connection. The actions most common to being online—scrolling, swiping, tapping, browsing, and clicking—are, however, perhaps first and foremost responses to the felt fact of networked connection. They’re about living in networked relation generally. Being networked, then, is less about striving for connection to anyone or anything than it is about maintaining and managing the felt experience of connection as such.”
(Also, side note, I wrote down this quote and began writing this post before Ashtrick quoted it in class, so I’m not just plagiarizing). It stems from a need to feel connected. If the urge to be connected through networks is satisfying an urge to feel social, where does the argument of “wasted time” come from?
I think it comes from the quality of the interaction: phatic vs physical. And it’s not as simple as saying that any online network or gaming interaction is inherently inferior to a physical face-to-face social interaction. They can both be “wastes of time”. You could be endlessly scrolling through social media, or clicking in a game, or devoting hours to grinding in a work-like MMORPG; you could just as easily be shooting the breeze with coworkers, wasting time listening to an annoying acquaintance complain to you when you’re trying to get work done in the library, or otherwise engaging in shallow social interaction.
With games however, if they are perceived as art forms to be consumed, vessels of an ideology or feeling, there seems to be a saturation point. When you “get the point” of a clicker game, finish a linear-narrative game, get to the reveal, the twist, the ending, or whatever that makes the game “worth playing” … When you perceive games as a consumable commodity, the notion of “wasted time” that occurs when consumption is over is inevitable. When you perceive games, or any phatic networking for that matter, as a different interaction modality, the notion of “wasted time” disappears.
What if scrolling on a waterfall feed could be a moment of contemplation, what if dating apps and sims are opportunities for self-reflection and exploration, what if clicker games are a practice in rapid quantitative reasoning— puzzle games a brain workout for visuospatial ability? Then there is no end goal to reach, no win condition. The playing experience becomes more about the process than the product. Gaming & phatic networking becomes a fulfilling intra- and intersocial interaction.
We often don’t try to impose the notion of “wasted time” onto physical social interactions? Few would dare exert that post-intercourse cuddling was “wasted time”, because after you’ve “finished” there’s no point in continuing to “play”. On the contrary, that kind of nonchalant end-goal oriented social interaction is perceived to be selfish, or even unhealthy. I think games deserve the same benefit of the doubt that we give physical social interactions, that is less about “getting the point” of the game, and more about play-centric affordances that emerge from diverse gameplay modalities.
