T w e n t y S i d e d

In addition to Dark Souls and Dave the Diver I’ve been playing All The Mods 10, the Minecraft modpack. I have probably thousands of hours of Minecraft experience but I’ve never worked through a big modpack like ATM10 until now. Recently I had a realization, though. I had spent dozens of hours in this pack optimizing and automating my way to being incredibly overpowered without doing much exploring. I can now wander around one-shotting basically everything. There’s no challenge anymore. I’m bored.

Now, the title is a joke. There’s nothing tied to masculinity that pushes me to minmax my way to boredom in games. It’s not even something I’m prone to doing too frequently. For instance, it’s well known that you can break Skyrim within an hour of play. Whenever I feel the urge to revisit the game I just don’t feel the desire to go out of my way to power level or exploit the game’s flawed blacksmithing and alchemy mechanics. It’s dull to me. There’s dozens other RPGs that have a particular method to get a massive head start and I typically avoid it, unless the early game sucks. I don’t often revisit Fallout 4 but when I do, you bet your ass I spend the first 30 minutes spamming shelves to pop up 10 levels or so.

On the other side of things, I go out of my way to do everything I can to get “OP” in Dark Souls short of using glitches. Insane base stats for a weapon? I’m rushing for it. Free early levels and resources from cheesing a boss? I’d say “Watch me,” but I already went there and got back, idiot. Keep up. My point is that I’m not afraid to beef myself up when the game is playing unfair first. The community around the Souls games entirely agrees with me too. I would say that’s a pretty fair assessment of some of the JRPGs I’ve played as well. Sometimes you get dropped into areas where the difficulty curve hits a spike and if you don’t want to repeat fights, grinding or finding some shortcuts are the way to go.

My problem in games and modpacks like ATM10 is that the grind is more rewarding than the actual gameplay. I want to see the number go up. I build my base, mine up resources, build machines, build BIGGER machines, then get completely lost as to what to do and eventually fall off. At this point, I think it’s more of a feature than a bug, though. Maybe the grind is the attraction, like with many MMORPGs and gacha games.

I’m sure there’s plenty more examples of games that create their own expiration date due to the grind being more engaging than the actual gameplay. For that I will trust you kind fellows in the comments. I’m far from an expert on games. I’m just an idiot that someone mistakenly trusted with a keyboard. So I genuinely have enjoyed reading what you all have to say. So lay it on me.

My greatest enemy and ally simultaneously in ATM10 is the 16GB of RAM on my laptop fighting for its life to keep it running.

Ethan Rodgers