Josh Sutphin
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Sabbatical Update 1

I’ve been on sabbatical for almost two months, and so far, it has not gone how I expected.

The initial plan was to take a break through July, then kick into "working sabbatical" mode in August. That’s because my step-kids were with us for the summer, and we wanted to spend a month focused on doing fun summer activities with them.

And we did that! They love aquariums and sea life — and frankly: so do I — so we took them to the Vancouver Aquarium and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, did a guided beach walk with naturalists from the Seattle Aquarium, and spent some time on beaches in both Seattle and Monterey. We also visited the Woodland Park Zoo and Redwood National Park.

After all that, the idea was to hand them off to their dad for the school year and then shift into a full working sabbatical focus. We did the first one, but the second one? It turns out, we struggled to shut down the vacation mindset.

I blame the burnout, but I also blame the lack of a concrete routine. We’ve been very ad hoc about sleep times, wake times, meal times, and daily activities, with lots of spontaneous outings and lots of unscheduled chore marathons, plus the full-time demands of raising a baby who’s rapidly turning into a toddler (in addition to the part-time demands of raising the two older step-kids).

It is very easy for the day-to-day, urgent "shallow work" to crowd out the long-term, important "deep work".

"Shallow work" versus "deep work" is the central theme of Cal Newport’s book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, which I first read several years ago and has been deeply rooted in my psyche ever since. We've had a huge amount of shallow work pile up at home over the last few years while our day jobs took up too much of our time and energy, and now we're trying to dig through that pile:

Balancing all that shallow work with the deep work of my sabbatical goals leverages organizational and emotional muscles that have long since atrophied, which means that so far I haven't managed to do much of the deep work at all.

In the book, Cal explores various tools for managing these struggles:

I clearly need to start using these kinds of tools with conscious intent. I've never had to do that before, because I spent so much of my game dev career unpartnered and living alone, so I didn't have anywhere near the amount of things competing for my attention; I misattributed that to me having relentless focus and excellent executive function, and now I'm living the other side of that ignorance and finding myself under-prepared for balancing this new reality.

There is another thing that's gotten in the way, too, which I'm equal parts ashamed and angry about: it turns out "idle games" are Kryptonite for my brain, and they swallowed an offensive amount of my attention before I realized what was going on.

It started with Tiny Tower, which I vaguely remembered from several years ago as having been an interesting, low-investment mobile game. I was looking for something casual and easly-interruptible to fill some of the awkward and sometimes-unpredictable spans of time that can come with parenting a one-year-old.

Well, it turns out the state of the art in idle game systems design has advanced considerably since 2016, and my burned-out not-quite-sabbatical-yet brain was not ready.

There are so many layers of random-unscheduled-reward systems now, and they're so much better-integrated with the core game, to the point that I found myself wanting to watch ads (what) because the doubled rewards felt like winning the lottery, and oh boy that's a sweet dopamine hit for a brain that's spent the last half-decade just wanting to feel nice for a while.

Like all idle games, Tiny Tower eventually slows down, and while I have spent somewhere between $10-15 on the game, I don't actually want to whale. But as the tower's pace slowed, I started experiencing these little gaps where I wanted more stuff to build and more easy wins to claim.

Then I saw an ad for Office Cat, an idle game with cute kitties and meowful cat puns. As an inveterate Monster Hunter fan, the cat puns absolutely nerd-sniped me, and I said to myself, "Why not ping-pong between both games? That'll keep those gaps nicely filled, right?"

And it did, until Office Cat also started to slow down, and oh my gods does that game have aggressive (some might say "outright hostile") monetization. I spent $18 to permanently remove ads, because nearly every desirable action in the game requires either premium currency (exhorbitant) or an ad view, to an excessive degree. But no sooner have you bought that package, than they start pushing the $8 "permanent 2x revenue" package, and you notice that without it, you never quite have enough money to keep your cats happy. And then there's the $8 "permanent 2x offline reward time" which extends how long your cats continue to generate resources after you close the game, because this game does not keep doing that indefinitely, which feels like a violation of idle game genre expectations? And then you get offered the $10 gem booster sale (listed as "normally" a whopping $72) which massively increases how many gems you get at certain level-up thresholds, from "useless pocket change" to "actually playable". Did I mention that one of the things you have to build in each office to keep your cats happy is paid for exclusively with gems? And that it's insanely expensive?

So I thought, "Okay, I'm definitely seeing the dark side of modern mobile games here; I should probably bail out." And then came the coup de grace: an early access "invite" (read: ad) to Brewtopia, an idle game about cultivating and brewing coffee.

Coffee. My one true vice. You can't just come at a guy like that!

Four straight hours (and two cups of real-world coffee) later, I found myself staring bleary-eyed at my phone while watering my umpteenth crop of Arabica, delivering request after request to a colorful cast of characters and advancing a faintly ridiculous storyline about an evil coffee corporation turning the townspeople into zombies, feeling a bit like the "this is fine" dog but pressing on anyway because the fire is made of dopamine and the burnout brain is so thirsty.

Then, the worst happened: that part of my brain that does game design on auto-pilot started noticing how these games' actual core mechanics are pretty trivial and bland, but the act of claiming rewards is super kinesthetically satisfying; and it noticed how kinesthetics has been kind of my jam as a game designer for 20 years, and I'm really good at it; and it noticed how all the production scope problems that make indie game development so hard are massively mitigated by the presentation style and UX of the idle game genre; and it noticed how I could totally make one of these and how I'm totally on sabbatical right now and have the time to do it...

Something has gone horribly wrong.

I've never been this person. Video game addiction always felt like something other people struggled with, and something that, as a game designer, I wanted to be careful not to feed into with my own work. I wasn't prepared to fall prey to it myself, and I certainly wasn't prepared for it to activate a mile-wide mimetic streak that had me halfway to abandoning all my goals in order to design my own dopamine slot machine because a dopamine slot machine was the thing currently immersion-blending my over-tired brain into a state of comfortable, easy, disassociated numbness.

Throughout August, I put enough time into these games that I could've planned, drafted, and revised a whole short story already. I put my own goals on hold for a series of cheap, easily-accessible dopamine hits. It feels like I took up smoking, and then got inspired to make and sell even more addictive cigarettes. And that realization, when it finally came, made me so angry.

But sometimes, anger is fuel. And I did manage to take a few steps in the right direction this month, which that fuel will help push me further toward.

I've planned three storytelling explorations for the sabbatical: one written, one audio, and one visual.

For the written one:

For the audio one:

For the visual one:

Now I'm working on establishing clearer daily routines and creating dedicated time and space for the "work" part of the sabbatical, so there's a corner of my life in which those projects can actually start to grow.

And I've deleted the damn idle games.

Created 8/27/2024 • Updated 8/29/2024