Games understand the human experience of boredom as well as any psychologist

BY ALEX WILTSHIRE Illustration Ollie Hoff

Here, against an endless horizon of orange sand, progress is practically eternal. You can drive for hours, chugging at a constant 45mph towards a notional Las Vegas with almost no change in the scenery. Or you can drive for hours, hitting the ball into hole after hole across forever-undulating topography. Desert Bus and Desert Golfing are boring games. They’re designed to be numbingly repetitive; they do not reward us with showers of praise or nuggets of story, nor do you find new places to go and new things to do. And yet we play them. We even celebrate them, basing charity events around Desert Bus For Hope – and Desert Golfing got a sequel.

For a medium that’s meant to be about excitement, games can coast awfully close to boredom at times. While Desert Bus and Desert Golfing intentionally play with the notion of being as boring as possible, there are also slow games which trade on the passing of time, like Animal Crossing, games which eke out rewards day by day. Then there are games about grinding repetitive actions for XP and low-drop-rate items. There are games about watching numbers go up; games about waiting for cooldowns to finish.

These ideas aren’t just common, they’ve become an integral part of modern game design, which routinely promises hundreds of hours of playtime stretched out across months or years. There’s Destiny 2’s sprawling drip-fed economy, which asks you to kill hundreds of gribblies a day in order to earn incremental opportunities to buy a chance to win a good gun or piece of armour. There are the mobile game grind-fests, from Puzzle & Dragons on down, which wring aeons of time from match-three puzzle mechanics. There’s Clash Of Clans, which strings every action out across hours and days to prolong the experience while encouraging you to buy boosts.

All this is to say that game developers know a lot about boredom: how to skate across its ocean, generating the greatest engagement from the least content that it’s economically viable for a studio to produce. They also know how to use boredom as a medium in itself; how to pace the spaces between excitement and how it can be the mother of creativity. They know how to crush boredom so well that games are extraordinarily good at inspiring obsession and compulsion in their players; designers know how we respond to boredom so well that they often have to rein in their command of it. In fact, it’s quite possible that a game designer instinctively knows as much about the human experience of boredom as a psychologist.

But Erin Westgate, director of the Florida Social Cognition And Emotion Lab at the University Of Florida, who specialises in researching boredom, says that videogames aren’t really seen as a place to study it. “Boredom researchers are not looking at videogames and not finding work related to games, but a lot of the principles are similar. For instance, I’ve seen a couple of dissertations and projects about the idea of using the concept of flow to structure videogames, and flow is the least bored you could ever be, right?”

Flow theory, which inspired thatgamecompany co-founder and creative director Jenova Chen’s synonymous first game, is the idea that you can induce a trance-like sense of deep immersion and focus by pitching a game’s difficulty level at a precise balancing point between what a player finds challenging and easy. And it just so happens that flow theory fits neatly into one of the two models which contemporary psychology uses to describe our experience of boredom.

Attentional boredom is the boredom we feel when an activity is either too easy or too hard and we disengage from it, our attention having lapsed. This is the kind of boredom that leads to frustration and agitation: we want something out of a game – the moment-to-moment thrill of control, to achieve a goal that we’ve been set – but we’re being blocked from experiencing it because the game is too hard (it’s over-stimulating us) or too easy (it’s under-stimulating). Flow is the antithesis to this kind of boringness, a state in which an activity is toeing the line between under-and over-stimulation.