This is day 1 of journaling with Selena. Today’s prompt:

What have you unlearned recently?

I am really bad at most conventional video games. God-awful at Fortnite, tried Valorant a few times and I think I’ve gotten a single kill, no good at Brawl Stars, and despite playing Minecraft for ages, I’m still horrible at PvP. Part of my issue may be my inability to aim, but now that I think of it, there’s one problem that’s followed me throughout all of these games that I think might be a deeper issue with how I operate.

Before I give this grand reveal, let’s talk about incremental games. Cookie Clicker, Clicker Heroes, and Kittens Game to name a few (all goated games that you should definitely check out by the way). The goal of these games is simple. Make numbers go bigger. For Cookie Clicker, you click a cookie, get more cookies, buy upgrades, and everything grows exponentially. Clicker Heroes, you slay monsters, get gold, hire and upgrade heroes, and so on. And Kittens Game, well, you are a kitten in a catnip forest turns into you are a kitten in a space-age civilization after a decent amount of grinding. As someone who really enjoys the feeling of progression, I am really drawn to incremental games. I mean, the numbers are going up. What else could I ask for?

Now, incremental games are often called something else: idle games. Games where once you’ve clicked a few times, theoretically, you can kind of let the game play itself. Do other things, come back, make some upgrades, and you’ve basically finished the entire gameplay loop. By design, you idle. Or at least, so I thought. In Cookie Clicker, I’d ignore the click upgrades because, at a certain point, my clicks were hardly making a dent in my progression. In clicker Heroes, I wouldn’t even use the abilities that each hero gave me, as I figured I’d just save them for later.

And boom. That’s the problem: that save for later mindset. My chests in Minecraft were stocked high with tons of resources, but I never actually got around to using them. I’d collect max mats in Fortnite, knowing damn well I couldn’t build do save my life. Guess it was just some welcome surprise for whoever got their hands on me. In Valorant, I wouldn’t invest in good guns, I’d only get a half-shield to build up money.

And this mindset hasn’t just applied to videogames. It’s something that I’ve lived all my life. My maternal grandparents, having lived through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, they know what it means to go hungry. They know what it feels like to have nothing to eat but tree bark and dirt, because anything green was already eaten. So I grew up in an environment where I knew what it was like to save, to constantly wrap and freeze meat for the hungry times, to load the pantry with five bags of rice and flour for when things got rough, and to always pack away everything into the basement, because, hey, who knows, maybe there’ll be a time it’ll be useful again.

But I know that the hungry times are not coming back. I’ve never been hungry a day in my life like the way my grandparents were. The abilities that I refused to use in Clicker Heroes refreshed after, what? 30 minutes tops. I’d already gotten all five builders in Clash of Clans with my gems, so I don’t know why I still hoarded them. I got a debit card two years ago, and I spend as if the money on the card is going to last me a lifetime.

I guess the point is, I’m unlearning this scarcity mindset I was raised with. I’m learning to throw things away. I’m learning to eat a golden apple and use splash potions before PvP in Minecraft. It’s ok not to have a full inventory, because it’s not as if I’m any good at quickly doing inventory management anyways.

I thought for a whole hour whether or not I was going to rent the domain jinfanhu.com. It was 34 dollars for two years. And damn it, it’s a subscription too. I was always told, “buying will always beat renting, because you never know when things are going to be taken away.” By the way, I looked up if frankhu.com was available. It’s not. It’s $990 to purchase. But hey, money is meant to be spent, and consumables are just that – meant to be consumed.

Yesterday, I hesitated to throw away an old pan that my grandparents took home from our town’s swap-stop next to the dump. It was rusty, yeah, we have plenty of pans at home, yeah, but it still works. But if there’s one thing that I’m not alone in unlearning, it’s the scarcity mindset. My mom’s been doing this for a while – she took it from my hands and put it in the trash without a second thought.

By the way, good game design encourages active play, even when it comes to idle games. Pop a wrinkler or two and you’ll see.