On Balatro, and my diminishing personal susceptibility to videogame addiction—even when I invite it in.

Things mentioned or alluded to in this episode:

The Salmon Walk in Ketchikan
The Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau
“Shipping Out” by David Foster Wallace, better known by its reprinted title of “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”
Nethack.org
The first trailer for Balatro
The Steam store page for Balatro, which includes the second trailer video that I mention
The mobile-version teaser trailer for Balatro

Full transcript:

What began as an embrace of nihilism in a desperate attempt to feel something while disconnected and adrift ended with a discovery of… nothing in particular. And the subtle difference between those two varieties of absence held a profound relief.

This is Venthuffer, a dream of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick.

I don’t need to dive deep into the reasons I didn’t have a great time during the interminable “sea days” of an Alaskan cruise last summer.

Really, I enjoyed our ports of call very much, from Ketchikan to Juneau, and I can go on at great length about my new appreciation for salmon, both as a meal, and as a symbol for the presence of the divine in nature, especially as represented in the ubiquitous formline artwork of the Pacific Northwest’s indigenous peoples.

The sea days, though, held little to inspire me. While I did pack a book or two, the prospect of being sealed in a bobbing vessel with no internet access and surrounded on all sides by the very same shuffling Trumpian decadence well documented in a famous essay by David Foster Wallace had me all but climbing the walls of my stateroom before dinnertime on day one.

This is when I resolved to do something that, for the past several months, I had forsworn. I pulled our Steam Deck from the luggage, and for the very first time, I fired up my partner’s copy of Balatro, which had launched earlier in the year, and which I had until that moment willed myself to avoid based on the reputation that it had immediately garnered.

Here’s what I thought would happen: Feeling, again, addiction as something almost physical, a fitlhy goblin that I invited to nest in my brain, its fist clutched around the nearest knot of axons. With a sharp yank, it could pull my attention back to the game, again and again, feeding it all the electricity of my faculties in exchange for keeping me numb to everything else, including the passage of time. With land nowhere in sight, it’s what I thought I wanted.

As you might infer, I have a certain history with profound video game addiction. I touched on it, indirectly, in episode five of Venthuffer, the one about Permadeath. I’ve never been one to fall under the sway of games that massage you with the sort of mild, unceasing success offered by Bejeweled and its ilk. Rather, my poison has always come in the form of Roguelikes. And, the Roguelikes know this.

“Thank you for the latest release of gradewrecker. My GPA just went in the corner and shot itself,” says the front page of Nethack, as it has for decades, quoting an early, anonymous addict of the venerable dungeon crawler. So it was for me, especially in my 20s and 30s, losing days or more to the endless chase for make-believe “experience points”, enumerated as an meaningless integer and graduated into arbitrary “levels”, and the narcotic pleasure of working hard for hours at a time for no external reward other than simply watching those numbers just… go up.

Balatro didn’t necessarily launch with the attitude that Nethack has, but very quickly grew into it and then far surpassed it, something you can track through Balatro’s progression of official trailers throughout 2024.

The Balatro launch trailer is a typically peppy introduction to the game and its own spin on deckbuilder mechanics. The trailer I first saw, though, shows how the Balatro team quickly adopted a more focused idea of who the game appealed to, stuffing the video with critical quotes about the game’s addictive qualities, and—most alarming to me—a slow zoom-in on a score-counter as its numbers grew larger and larger and caught on fire, the result of a particularly strong play. That is to say, a shockingly naked appeal to those with a certain susceptibility to seeing a number going up. Months later, the announcement of the game’s mobile version had become an overt, swaggering troll. The video intermixes bewildering flashes of gameplay footage with anxious horror-movie sound effects and shots of players weeping in despair while the publishers cheer in triumph. The teasing grin of the game’s mascot transforms into a dreadful, close-up leer, boasting of the game’s mental domination over its paying audience.

And, as the north Pacific wind whipped over me, lying alone on the promenade deck, clutching my Steam Deck in freezing fingers, I chose to willingly submit to all of it. Anything to keep me alive until we anchored at Victoria, B.C. I launched the game. I played the tutorial. I let myself drift.

It was… fine. I mean, it’s a good game. I admired the design, but to my surprise, it didn’t really speak to me. The most negative thing I felt was mild frustration at losing again and again, without the ever-present tug towards a distant but seemingly attainable victory that I have long expected from roguelikes. And so it just became a merely interesting passtime, and not the sucking void that I was promised by its own marketing materials.

After returning home, my partner taught me some basic Balatro strategies, letting me achieve my first wins. I found myself appreciating and even enjoying the game a bit more. And this feels like where the story should take a dark turn, but, no, not here either. My total playtime with Balatro has yet to surpass 20 hours. I do still pick it up now and again, but just for the sake of variety between other games or activities. The goblin never moved in.

And it’s not just Balatro. I’ve become reacquainted with Caves of Qud since I last spoke about it on Venthuffer, playing in pleasant bursts as time and interest allow, and disinclined to let it hook me again. I’ve also played the first few chapters of the 2024 JRPG epic Metaphor Refantazio, and while I know my younger self would have been completely parasitized by its expertly engineered treadmill of overlapping quests and ever-rising levels, I felt pleasantly full and pushed back from the table somewhere in the high teens. I’m sure I’ll dip in for another visit when I next have an appetite for that particular sauce, though I’ll lack the desire to drown in it.

I have a hypothesis about the relevant changes in me that have allowed me to casually stroll through games that were once bear-traps for my time and attention. In the past, when I knew I was making poor use of my time at a game that I kept picking up anyway, I would sometimes mutter out loud: I can feel myself getting older. This was an inexperienced way of expressing a lament that I’ve since become more familiar and even comfortable with: my time and attention are my most limited and precious resource. The notion of “wasting time” seems like such an anodyne scold when one is young, like “wasting water”. My growing awareness of my attention’s finitude has, I think, weakened the ability for any video game to wholly subsume it for very long.

But there’s something else too, both subtler and, in a way, more real. Video games have always been important to me, a primary route to staying playful. But I’ve come to value them more as experiences than challenges. Today I have as much desire to spend hundreds of hours with any one game as I would with any one book, or film. Certainly some rare examples might deserve that much attention, but generally I prefer to acknowledge, appreciate, and maybe even savor the unique experience that a game has to offers, and then move along. Maybe that happens at a credits-roll, and maybe that happens when the game seems to start repeating itself. I set it down with gratitude, I push back, I move along.

And I let myself take pleasure, even eagerness, in having something to move along to: Maybe another game, or some other media, or maybe a completely different vessel for my attention: spending time with a friend, or taking another swing at learning piano. Or, yes, writing out a podcast script!

Experiences have a lasting physical component, you know. Novelty, and discovery, and learning, all score themselves in the white matter of your brain, making connections that change you in the most literal sense possible. Even if I can’t see a number tallying of how many neural pathways I’ve grown, I increasingly suspect that it’s the only number-going-up in my life that I ultimately care about. I’m not saying that I have the antidote for the stagnation of game addiction. But I have realized that, for me, the way to keep that goblin away from its nest is simply… to crowd it out.

This has been Venthuffer...