Something about games
(Indirect continuation of my old rant from Mastodon)
I despise retention mechanics and dark patterns in video games, because I easily fall for them. The only relief I have is that I'm too broke to have money to spend on microtransactions.
It all started with Genshin Impact. I previously avoided Genshin, thinking it was a "gooner" game after seeing the ad with Rosaria (though I wasn't entirely wrong I suppose), but one day something possessed me and I gave it a chance around version 3.4.
At first I actually quite enjoyed the game, the characters, and exploration. When Fontaine released, I was even more enamored with the story and especially Furina's character. But eventually my enjoyment started to drop for several reasons.
The first blow was finding out about the "meta". I never cared much about it, but it was becoming hard to ignore because I am the type of person to binge wiki content. Eventually I managed to get over it, making Kirara, a 4 star, my preferred "main", even though that's not her recommended role.
However, I slowly began to realize something. I've spent hours and hours farming for characters, trying to save up enough to get the ones I wanted and make them strong. One of the worst offenders by far was artifact farming. You have to get the right main stats, the right substats, AND have the right substats get chosen when leveling them up.
But nothing is worse than farming primogems. The only time I paid for pulls it felt like cheating and I regretted it immensely, so I stuck to being F2P. But when you feel the pressure of an upcoming banner, you start trying to squeeze them from every source. Not to mention that for farming pretty much any resources it's encouraged to log in daily, otherwise you'd be missing out.
Previously, the story and characters managed to compensate for all this. They weren't perfect, in fact I had many grievances, but they were good enough. I was also studying in university, and some of my classmates were into Genshin, so I felt like I could bond with them over that. The various Genshin content creators also brought me some joy.
However, eventually I grew so tired of grinding that I decided to quit. The decision was also helped by the various scandals and valid critiques of the game in the community. I even decided to wipe my account to make sure that I wouldn't ever come back.
This felt like a wise decision, because it did indeed make me stay away from the game for good. I had a small period of time where I wanted to come back specifically for the sake of one male character, but it ended when he went through some stuff that would've made it difficult for him to be playable.
Later, I was compiling a database of all the characters I've ever made or used, and remembered that I played a game called Realm of the Mad God as a kid. The last time I tried playing it on my laptop I experienced severe lag, so I wasn't sure if it would work for me, but it did. And this time, I was also a lot better at the game. I was completely hooked.
Unlike with Genshin Impact, the gameplay didn't feel like a chore, it felt fun. It was a bullet hell type of game, somewhat like Touhou, but with roguelike mechanics. It also lacked a gacha system for playable characters, you unlocked the playable classes through gameplay. You weren't limited by the daily "resin" to get the right character gear either.
Overall it felt like a pretty nice experience. I also got into a RotMG content creator's community and even got a chance to play alongside him at one point (though I really sucked lol). I even won a spot in a pet designing contest for the game in its official Discord server.
However, I eventually started having a suspiciously similar feeling. I knew that the game had microtransactions, but the full extent only hit me later. Leveling a pet (which is essential for healing and restoring magic points) is extremely tedious the free way. Same with the item vault spaces and character slots, which you could technically get for free. Character skins, naturally, were locked behind the premium currency or a ton of grinding. You could even get gear with currency, which was somewhat tempting since you could die frequently and lose yours, though very inadvisable.
The second "hit" was the FOMO design. There was the rewards calendar, which you had to claim every day if you wanted to get the mystery pet and character skins by the end of the month. And there were events with event-exclusive skins which would only come around every so often. Eventually I started to play the game not out of enjoyment, but to chase all those rewards.
What got me out of the loop was a well-timed break. I wanted to check out the newly-released Deltarune chapters 3 and 4 and stepped away from RotMG. After experiencing the fantastic story without having to grind for much of anything, I realized that I don't have to play games I didn't fully enjoy, and quit RotMG, without even using the pet contest prize. I also really got into ULTRAKILL and enjoyed it for a while.
However, this break from time investment-heavy games didn't last forever. Around November 2025 I heard that Genshin Impact added a customizable character with its Miliastra Wonderland feature, and I was immediately interested, to the point of making a new account. But when I actually got to that feature, I was extremely disappointed with the very limited customization and even worse gacha system (it's basically mandatory to use premium currency to get a 5 star skin for the customizable character).
I foolishly decided to give the game another chance anyway, believing that my previous experience wouldn't repeat. What followed was months of trying to catch up to my previous account's level of progress and trying to farm for multiple banners in quick succession because I lacked the "meta" characters. I didn't even start playing through story at the point where I left off when I realized I was just grinding for hours again without any enjoyment.
This time it wasn't just FOMO. I felt like if I quit now, then all of those months of progress, all that time that I could've spent on literally any other hobby or even getting myself out of debt, would've been in vain. Playing Genshin was also enough incentive for me not to stay in bed all day wallowing in depression. I was stuck in uncertainty for a long time, eventually deciding to just limit my playtime.
Then, when I was randomly browsing Pinterest, I saw some artwork of a jester character from a game I haven't seen before. I learned that he was from an 18+ visual novel called The Freak Circus. I was very hesitant at first, thinking that the story would be cringy or that I would dislike some other aspect of the game, but eventually curiosity got the better of me and I checked it out.
At first I was indeed a bit bashful and amused by some slightly clunky writing, but after some time away from it I realized that I actually quite liked it, and my embarrassment came from fear of being judged for it. I proceeded to immediately lose interest in Genshin Impact again, and even got the urge to draw without external pressure for the first time in months. The cycle was over.
Is there a moral to this story? Probably not. Frankly, after reading everything you might think "well duh, you should try out different things" or "gacha games are actually great, you just had an unhealthy mindset". Well, one thing I know is, quitting felt a lot harder when I was still going through the cycles.
And I feel a lot better now.
