I am tempted to put off writing this blog entry to go play some League of Legends. Part of it is because it's a fun game, but part of it is also a nagging reminder that my reward for First Win of the Day is available: "You should go do that before it gets too late and throws off the timer for tomorrow." I grit my teeth and keep writing about my resolution not to fall prey to those schedules anymore.

Games often exploit obsessive-compulsive behavior. Massive amounts of collectibles is just one way of doing so; a more recent, more insidious method is time-based rewards. I first saw them in World of Warcraft's Daily Quests and Daily Dungeons, and many online games have adopted similar mechanics. LoL and Smite both give you extra points for your First Win every day, while numerous online games (such as Terra Battle, an iOS game Drew showed off earlier this year) reward you simply for logging on each day for 7 days in a row. It reduces player drop-off by giving you a reason to open the game aside from "I want to play the game", but it can make the game more work than fun for the player. I've trudged through dozens of LoL matches not because I wanted to play more of it, but because I wanted to win the damn Daily Reward before I moved on to other things.

Many free-to-play games take it a step further with special events and deals where you're encouraged to clear some goal in X days to get a very nifty reward. Technically World of Warcraft has been doing it ever since it started doing holiday events, but it feels much more insidious when you only have a day to get enough gems to take advantage of a special offer, or you have to play 2-3 hours every day for a week straight to get the best prize. A lot of my playtime recently has been less about enjoying the game and more about keeping up with the Joneses and squeezing every last ounce of loot I can from these special offers.

Don't even get me started on free-to-play Stamina Bars and how they encourage you to check the game every 2-3 hours to maximize how much you can do.

By New Year's Eve, I was checking & playing 5 games daily, not because I wanted to play them, but because I wanted to keep the daily reward train going. It got monotonous and I was getting sick of it. When I thought about it, it seemed absurd I was treating games more like work than entertainment. So I decided to ignore the temptations that made it work.

Amongst my New Year's resolutions, I've vowed to only play a game if I want to play it, not because I feel compelled to win some time-based reward.

I might blog later about how well it's going, but I'm already being tempted to log into each game "for just a bit" to keep the rewards flowing. These reward-hooks dug in deeper to me than I thought; who knows how many hours I've lost to playing games just because I wanted rewards rather than because they were fun? It'll be interesting to see how my gaming habits change as a result of purposely avoiding that.