Have you ever hit a point, playing a video game, where you get bored of the game itself? I don't mean the story gets boring, or the game getting to hard it loses fun. When the actual mechanics of the game loses its je ne sais quoi and play become rote, and, well, mechanical.
This is how it happens for me: my mental model of the game abstracts away almost everything and the whole game devolves into an optimization problem. At first, I'll feel clever, like I "solved" the game. But the game hasn't ended, so what have I solved for? I've solved for the how, how to min-max my way to the fastest most efficient win condition. For me, I've come to to refer to this as seeing the spreadsheet behind the game (it's particularly strong phenomenon in strategy games, which is a bummer because I used to love strategy games).
On the other side of this spectrum would be games of purely random numbers with no place for human influence, like slot machines. Which I've noticed seems to be the core mechanic of–and I don't want to overgeneralize–about 99% of the mobile game market, god help us all.
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