Help! I have disappeared down a rabbithole of horrible mobile gaming adverts
Led by the nose from game to terrible game by increasingly disturbing and terrible adverts, I feel like I’m in the cinema scene from A Clockwork Orange
We’re all escaping something when we play video games. Mostly it’s the drabness of real life, where we don’t get to command kingdoms using armies of dragons, win Champions League trophies with our local team, or inhabit the body of an improbably speedy hedgehog.
Sometimes I play them because I want to escape from the version of me that gets paralysed by depression, and boy has the black dog been sniffing at my bits recently, because the Atlantic Ocean is separating me from my wife for a few months. For 30 years she has been the light that banishes that darkness, and I am honestly lost without her. If that sounds pathetic, you haven’t met her. She leaves everybody she meets feeling better. It’s a superpower that warrants a call from the X-Men.
I have now spent weeks struggling to write in an empty-feeling house, so I turned to video games to banish the blues. Unfortunately, it became a descent into hell.
The problem is that I wasn’t using proper, well-made video games as antidepressants. I told myself I was too busy for that. I simply promised my sad brain that if it could write for half an hour, I would treat it to 10 minutes of iPhone gaming. Just a wee taste of fun to get me out of my miserable headspace.
I started with Sled Surfers, where you catapult a character on a sled down an icy course, collecting coins and diamonds that you can use to improve your sled and catapult. When you finally have enough power to get to the finish line you move on to the next level. Level design, sound, graphics and gameplay were all pleasingly fun, but each run costs you a ticket. When you run out, you have to wait 20 minutes for another one. Or pay cash. Or … watch some ads! These are standard freemium impatience tricks born from Mafia Wars and FarmVille on Facebook.
Initially the ads I watch are for other games. They let me try them for free, like drug dealers do. Royal Match is a tile-match game, where you race against the clock as a serpent tries to eat the king. I download the game. There are no king v serpent shenanigans. It’s just a boring Candy Crush rip-off.
That game makes me watch an ad for something called Slap and Run. I download that, too. You control a stick man who slaps folk, then gets chased by them. It’s OK, but I worry it will encourage kids to do the same in public – you know, the same ones who ate Tide pods. The game makes me sad, but it gives me an ad for Castle Busters, which is like Worms meets Angry Birds, but not as good as either.
Snake Clash!, an update to the OG Nokia game, has the worst ad yet, starring an AI slop human streamer who only speaks in the dialect of Outburst, comprised of quasi-meaningless phrases like, “Buckle up, Rookie!”, “This is illegal!” and “Are you kidding me?” strung together into sentences with nary a break for proper scansion. They promise there are no ads, so I download it. But there are ads. You have to watch them to revive your snake.
This leads to RUSH: Xtreme, Annoying Uncle Punch, Hole, and Hungry Balls – not, as you may think, the titles of Seth Rogen movies, but four more silly cheap games, the playing of which makes my phone get so hot so quickly I expect celebrities to try eating it with Sean Evans on Hot Ones.
I give up downloading games and instead try to find hacks to bypass the ads quicker. I click on the button that allows me to say whether I am interested or not. I select NOT. It still keeps playing. I click on the Privacy Notice to check my options: the screen freezes. These ads are stuck on your screen for between 60 and 120 seconds, but it feels like for ever. Nothing lets you skip it quicker. I am being force-fed slop.
Eventually, as I disappear down this rabbit hole, ads for other games are replaced by ones for slot machine apps, or games that try to make you believe that you’ll earn cash for playing them. It’s all a grift in some grimy, gaming-adjacent underworld. Then it gets personal and the ads turn to life insurance for seniors, AI dating assistants and an ocean of erectile dysfunction pills. I feel as if I’m in that scene from A Clockwork Orange, with more and more distressing content rammed into my eyes.
I wanted a panacea, instead I have ended up in this nadir of algorithms. Next time I will play Pokémon Pokopia and ask my doctor to double my dose of antidepressants instead.
-
Dominik Diamond Sings the Video Games is at The Loading Bar, London, on 29 September
- Games
- Advertising
- comment
