Oh maaaaaan. This hit me right in the feels, because during the pandemic I became addicted to this terrible awful tablet/mobile game, Heroes Charge, which has that free-to-play dynamic where it gets you hooked and then, buuuuut if you pay some money you could do it better! And without having to do the annoying thing!
And then it does something really diabolical: it encourages you to join a guild. Once you're in a guild with other players, the pressure really ratchets because you don't want to let your teammates down, and some of them spend a lot (a LOT) of money on the game which normalizes it for everyone else, and you think, well, I could spend a few bucks, that's not nearly as much as Guildmate is spending... It's terrible and I am ashamed to admit the number of hours I spent in 2020 playing this stupid game, and that I actually did spend money once on (I think it was like $20 all together, not that much, but before that I had been proud of never giving in to that kind of pressure in a mobile game).
After a while I was able to stop because my pandemic existential crisis got a little better, I guess, but it gave me a whole new understanding of how your mental health can be just a little off and something like this can be a vampiric-like horribly-backfiring way of compensating for it.
And yeah, there were people in my guild, ordinary people, who were literally spending more than a hundred dollars a month on this game. They weren't even the biggest spenders, either -- my guild wasn't that competitive as it had people like me in it who spent almost nothing. The top guilds, yeesh.
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Date: 2022-06-23 05:28 am (UTC)And then it does something really diabolical: it encourages you to join a guild. Once you're in a guild with other players, the pressure really ratchets because you don't want to let your teammates down, and some of them spend a lot (a LOT) of money on the game which normalizes it for everyone else, and you think, well, I could spend a few bucks, that's not nearly as much as Guildmate is spending... It's terrible and I am ashamed to admit the number of hours I spent in 2020 playing this stupid game, and that I actually did spend money once on (I think it was like $20 all together, not that much, but before that I had been proud of never giving in to that kind of pressure in a mobile game).
After a while I was able to stop because my pandemic existential crisis got a little better, I guess, but it gave me a whole new understanding of how your mental health can be just a little off and something like this can be a vampiric-like horribly-backfiring way of compensating for it.
And yeah, there were people in my guild, ordinary people, who were literally spending more than a hundred dollars a month on this game. They weren't even the biggest spenders, either -- my guild wasn't that competitive as it had people like me in it who spent almost nothing. The top guilds, yeesh.