365 True Things: 20/Addiction

I do, I admit, have a fondness for mindless time-wasting—specifically, games: on my phone, on the computer, on the iPad. Word games aren't a problem: they stretch my mind for a few minutes, and I move on. But then there are those dangerous games where you manipulate shapes, say, or match similarly colored balls to make them disappear, and try not to let the shapes/balls accumulate—in which case you die an ignominious death. For some reason, those games suck me right in: it's an addiction. Because even after I "win" once, I can come up with all sorts of loftier goals, like a higher high score or no more than one life lost per level or (ha ha) a "perfect" game.

I.e., there's no such thing as winning. And so, paradoxically, you have to keep playing.

It's really rather embarrassing, and I'm only fessing up here because I know no one is reading this. Well, that and . . . unfortunately, it's a true thing about me. And that's what this blog is supposed to be about.

A few months ago I realized that I was wasting far too much time on those sorts of games. Zuma, Peggle, Sparkle: those were my three go-tos (all intended for ten-year-olds, I should point out). I'd sit down "just for a minute," and thirty or more minutes later I'd realize I'd been mesmerized, transported to the dark side. So I took action and deleted them all. Gone, in one fell swoop.

All but one, that is: I kept Two Dots. I'd learned about it in a New York Times article about time management apps—you know, the ones you can purchase to save you from yourself, or, more specifically, from your "device"? The reporter used the word addictive to describe the game, which should have sent me fleeing, but no: I decided to check it out. And somehow it ended up on my phone. Go figure.

The nice thing about Two Dots, and the reason I felt okay about keeping it, is that you only get five lives, and each takes twenty minutes to regenerate. Which guarantees, once you're dead, dead, dead, dead, and dead, that you have to take a good long break. (Well, you can sputter along, one game every twenty minutes, but what's the fun in that?) And losing five lives, especially as the game got progressively more complicated, took no more than ten minutes. Okay, fifteen. In any case, Two Dots takes care of you. It doesn't want to parasitize you.

It's also got very cool graphics, and the music is cheery silly fun—it makes you happy. And the act of swishing your finger around to make little squares or otherwise cause dots of a particular color to vanish is so satisfying.

However: I have now finished all 260 levels. I did go back and made sure all levels had been won at at least a two-star ranking (the one exception being level 123, which is simply impossible to get more than one star on, I'm convinced). And . . . I'm done! My compulsion to play Two Dots has vanished! I am free!

Until the promised next level, Emerald Rapids, is introduced, anyway. But maybe I'll forget to check to see if that happens. (One can dream.)

Since the great banishing act, I'll admit that I've added a couple of new games. One, Monument Valley, a gorgeous little journey through a series of Escher-esque landscapes, took me a few days to get to the end of. Yes, okay, I did proceed from one level to the next to the next etc., pretty much without stopping except to walk the dog or eat, but the goal was to finish. Right? And I did. Another new game, Three, involves adding 1s, 2s, and 3s, and multiples of 3, to get a high score. It's amusing in a limited capacity: not addicting. (Although I did just create my first 192-point tile. I wonder if there's one worth 384?)

The line between addicting and not is a very, very fine one—at least for me, at least when it comes to games. But it's good to know that, in a pinch, I can exercise the power of deletion. At the moment, thankfully, I think I have this particular addiction under control.