Yesterday, someone asked me to review a thesis on the future of games. Somewhere in the conversation, a question came up: “How many games can you feasibly play as a human concurrently?”
The question took me back—way back—to my first real game addiction, a browser game called OGame. Dumb, relentless, real-time. This was before mobile internet, so to keep my account alive, I’d sneak away from school during breaks to log in. It was thrilling and consuming, until my school efforts suffered, and I decided to commit in-game suicide. I still remember this teenage-angst moment, the hours poured into that account—it felt like giving up a part of myself. Maybe I’m being dramatic, but games can get personal and addictive like that. I even kept a screenshot on an old hard drive, like a memory saved in my photo library.
Games hook us. Games lock us in. So much so that now I regulate myself—maybe one or two games a year. I already know that when GTA6 drops, I’ll have to disappear from the world until I see the end credits. But yesterday’s conversation turned from video games to a bigger question: What are the games we play on a larger scale or without even realizing they are games?
If you’re deep into crypto, blockchain, on-chain, web3—whatever you call it these days—it’s clear this entire space is one massive game. For some, it’s the dark forest of The Three-Body Problem; for others, it’s like Civilization or Factorio, a coordination game. For me mostly I see it as a global casino, a 24/7 PVP (player vs. player) battle royale with on-chain stats visible to all. And when I thought about it more, it hit me: the games I play aren’t just the ones with beautiful graphics and avatars with micro-transactions outfits in the metaverse.
I play my Strava game—don’t show stats but secretly compare myself to others. I play the income game, constantly chasing deals. The family game, the love game. The online reputation and status game across multiple networks. There’s always another “game” running in parallel, another leaderboard in my mind reminding me that I’m behind.
And it’s only gotten worse. The more content, the more game mechanics, the more apps, the more metrics—the more fragmented we become. My Apple Watch rings are a real-time game. My sleep stats are a game. My Hyperliquid Perps account, my minting on Zora, my discussions, my shitposting. What the hell? Every scoreboard just tells me one thing: “I’m behind. I’ve already lost to the online realm.”
As a designer, I can’t ignore that I’m part of the problem. I’m guilty of building these loops, tightening attention spans, putting in effort to keep people hooked. I thought I was designing for play, but really, I was setting up scoreboards. So many scoreboards to keep track of. It’s no wonder I feel exhausted by my very own creations.
Status is a game. Finance is a game. Civic duty is a game (now with live betting). Online performance is a game. Hello LinkedIn. Hello credit scores. And luckily, I’m out of the dating game, but I can only imagine the mental load of that one alone.
We’re lured into new games with every click, but the more games we play, the more fractured we become. The imposter syndrome only deepens as I see others—chronically online, winning on their leaderboards, posting success stories—and I think, “I’m losing this game too.” Monthly recurring revenue as an indie creator has become a daily reminder of my position on the board.
It’s like we’re stuck in a theme park inside a casino resort, where every moment is just another chance to lose, and the house, servers, whales—they always win. Games aren’t even collaborative anymore. I miss couch co-op, the team-based wins. Now it’s solo survival, everything PVP. Somehow we convinced ourselves that life is better as a “Souls-like” experience than a good old round with friends in Overcooked. One of my favorite board games is still Pandemic, where the only way to win is together. But “winning together” has turned into just another narrative we tell ourselves, while really, it’s a strategy for asymmetrical gains. We justify it by saying the markets are efficient, but the market game might just be the most brutal of all.
And all of this has me questioning: have we reached game saturation? A new game emerges every day, each more high-stakes than the last, and I wonder if I’m betting on the right ones or just succumbing to sunk cost fallacy. Do I even want to play all these games? Sometimes I look at the live-service landscape and see a reflection of life itself—a continuous click bait model where there’s no end, no break, only maintenance. Or maybe that’s just me, asking myself which game I am destined to win.
But the hardest truth is that I can’t keep up with it in reality. I miss the creative, collaborative play, where the stakes didn’t matter. Now, everything is poker—each move calculated, every relationship a strategy. We traded the sandbox for KPIs, for metrics, for status games. No Gain, no game. And I’m no different, playing the game, using my asymmetric advantage to get ahead.
In the end, I can’t ignore the feeling that I’ve lost something. Play has been overtaken by Game, and with attention spread thin, we bet on our best guesses and lose most of the time. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t play all the games at once, but here we are, stuck in the theme park, with the casino next door, and just one more bet.
Insert Coin.
