The rumble in the controller is a familiar, dull thud. Not the exciting, chaotic vibration of a boss battle, but the monotonous confirmation of a task completed. The 48th gargoyle shatters into digital dust against a pixelated sky. My eyes flick from the top right of my screen to the bottom left of my other monitor, where a soft-spoken YouTuber is already directing me to gargoyle number 49. There’s a map with red circles, a flight path optimized for maximum efficiency. There is no joy in this. There is only the grim satisfaction of a line item being struck from a list.

The Analyst and the Eight Years Lost

I was talking about this with my friend, Zara V.K., the other day. Zara is a supply chain analyst, a profession that’s all about finding the most efficient path from A to B. Her brain is wired for optimization. She sees flowcharts in her sleep. For years, this made her a terrifyingly effective gamer. She’d finish massive open-world games in 238 hours, with every single one of the 128 hidden feathers, magical shards, or ancient tablets accounted for. Her friends would be amazed. “How do you have the patience?” they’d ask. And Zara would just shrug. To her, it wasn’t patience; it was process. The game was a system, and the goal was to solve the system completely.

The moment of revelation came when she spent an entire Saturday hunting for 18 rare fish, a task requiring specific weather conditions, moon cycles, and a lure that cost an absurd amount of in-game currency. She caught the final fish, the achievement popped, and she felt nothing. Not relief, not pride. Just a hollow emptiness and the immediate, nagging thought: “What’s the next checklist?”

The Dopamine Pellet Trap

It’s a dopamine trap, plain and simple. Game developers, whether intentionally or not, have tapped into the same part of our brain that gets a little thrill from checking an email or crossing something off a to-do list. Intrinsic joy-the pure, unadulterated fun of swinging through a city or building a perfect little farm-is a slow burn. It’s satisfying, but it doesn’t provide the constant, tiny pings of reward that our brains have been trained to crave. An extrinsic reward, like a trophy for ‘Collect All 88 Mushrooms,’ is a quick hit. It’s a manufactured, easily digestible pellet of validation.

And we chase the pellet, not the experience.

My Own Shameful Memory

I’m not immune to this. I have to admit, I once prided myself on my completion percentage. I saw it as a sign of dedication, of getting the most value for my $78 purchase. I was wrong. It was a sign of being a good employee. My most shameful memory is of playing a critically acclaimed story-driven game, and in the middle of a deeply emotional cutscene, I was alt-tabbing to a guide to make sure I hadn’t missed a collectible in the area.

The characters were pouring their hearts out, and I was worried about a shiny trinket. That’s the moment the parasite reveals itself; it eats the soul of the experience and leaves the husk of the mechanics behind.

Alphabetizing Our Fun

It reminds me of the time I tried to optimize my kitchen. I read somewhere that organizing your spices alphabetically was the key to culinary efficiency. So I spent hours doing it. It looked beautiful. It felt productive. The next day, I went to make chili and couldn’t find the cumin for a solid eight minutes because my brain doesn’t think “C”; it thinks “that yellowish powder in the small jar.” The system I imposed, in search of a hollow sense of order, made the actual act of cooking more difficult and less intuitive. We are doing the same thing to our playtime, systematizing the joy right out of it. We alphabetize our fun until we can’t find it anymore.

This isn’t to say all achievements are bad. Some are genuinely clever, rewarding players for creative thinking or for discovering a delightful secret. But the majority have become digital makework. Find X of Y. Kill Z number of W. They’re the laziest form of content extension, designed to keep you on the hamster wheel for another 18 hours. Zara’s burnout wasn’t with gaming itself, but with this specific, exhausting model of it. She started actively looking for games where the core loop wasn’t a checklist, but an experience. She found an entire ecosystem of games that valued atmosphere and feeling over achievement notifications. It’s a shift many people are making, exploring lists of Cozy Games on Nintendo Switch to find something that feels like a refuge, not a second job. These games often don’t have a fail state, or a hundred things to collect; their only objective is for you to simply be in their world.

Breaking the Cycle

Breaking the cycle is weirdly difficult. The first time you consciously decide not to chase the collectibles, it feels like you’re doing something wrong. The little icons on the map call to you. The empty slots in your completion log are a silent judgment. It takes effort to ignore the programming and ask the only question that actually matters:

If the answer is no, if you’re just methodically clearing a map like you’re exterminating a multi-legged pest you found in your apartment, it’s time to put the controller down and reassess. The game is supposed to be the escape from the checklist, not a digital replica of it. Zara hasn’t looked at a trophy guide in months. The other day I saw her playing a game where she just ran a little coffee shop for talking animals. There were no leaderboards. There were no hidden gargoyles. She was just arranging furniture and listening to the sound of rain on the roof. She looked peaceful. She looked like she was finally playing.