Playing Video Games Taught Me the Pleasure of Work
Work can be a lot of fun without the real life anxiety
When I was a child, and my dad would come visit every other weekend, Sunday afternoon was often reserved for watching football. I can’t remember whether he was a Jets or Giants fan, or anything about the content of the actual games, other than I found them painfully boring and was unable to comprehend why anybody would feel differently. So if you were to tell me that 20+ years later, I would spend 68 hours over three weeks playing Madden 22, an NFL simulator game — plus many more watching actual football games, football documentaries, and reading football news — I would have not believed you.
I’ve been a gamer for four years or so and a sports fan for half that time. While looking for a new video game to get hooked on, I asked a friend if she thought I’d like Madden. “Madden is life,” she responded. So I downloaded it, slogged through some tutorials, and indeed, Madden quickly became life, so much so that it made living my “real” life significantly more difficult.
Most afternoons, I can’t help but knock off work early to play Madden. I do the bare minimum — start the article I am supposed to be finished with and send one out of maybe six emails I need to reply to — before I am drawn to the PS5 controller like a magnet, like I have no choice but to continue playing a perfect season of football as the Las Vegas Raiders, starving for the satisfaction of winning another game, maybe against a team like the Kansas City Chiefs that the real-life Raiders were unable to beat this season. (My Raiders won the game 42–7.)
My Madden addiction makes it harder for me to do my work, which is funny because Madden is fundamentally a work simulator. And that’s sort of the fun of the whole thing! The job I’m pretending to have, a professional athlete, is far more novel than my own. Madden uses a lot of the same parts of my brain as my real job does. I have to problem-solve, figure out whether it’s more effective to run the ball, throw it long or short, whether to go for it on 4th down or settle for a field goal, if it makes more sense to blitz or do man coverage. But unlike my actual life, Madden has no stakes. If I don’t like how a game is going, I can start it over. Doing poorly in the game…
