How playing Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (sorta) helped me to procrastinate less

...and why all tools must eventually break

Okay, from the outset I can see how the title of this post appears to be clickbait.

Productivity + currently popular video game = clicks from people who seek distraction while hoping that the distraction will somehow make them a better person .

One look at my current life and career trajectory will tell you all you need to know about how qualified I am for helping you to smash your life goals in a non-literal sense.

I can only say that I recently did something that I had almost given up hope of ever doing again. I dropped the kids at school , came straight home, sat down, started writing. I then then looked up at the clock, saw that three hours had passed and thought that I probably should eat something. I ate, wrote for another hour, made a recording of what I had written and then went to collect the kids. Four hours of writing in one day.

Having gone through a long, unproductive (possibly depressed) period, I immediately got to introspecting about what the special sauce was for this burst of productive energy.

I couldn't discount how the day had panned out. My wife was in the office rather than working from home, I didn't have go for for a grocery shop and the student I was supervising had to reschedule our meeting. As far as potential interruptions were concerned, the runway was clear. But I've had a few clear runways before and suspected that there was something else. After all, the plane isn't going anywhere of it has an empty tank.

Quick message to all my long-suffering non-gamer readers

You may have caught wind of a certain video game coming out the other weekend. It appeared on a few buses and billboards here and there, it even had a feature on the BBC 6 O'Clock News. If you are in Australia you might even have happened across this advert that got many people right in the feels:

The Legend of Zelda - Tears of the Kingdom (TotK henceforth) is the latest game in Nintendo's long-running Zelda franchise and is the linear sequel to the Nintendo Switch console's launch title, Breath of the Wild (BotW).

The game features the silent protagonist, Link, Princess Zelda (who, in the early hours of my playthrough, doesn't seem to have escaped the Damsel in Distress trope) and a host of other canonical characters.

While the story is a bit more interesting than its predecessor, the real appeal of the current Zelda games are their opportunities for exploration, improvisation and creativity.

In the huge open world there is always something interesting jutting out of the horizon and, if it really captures your attention, you can find your own way of getting to it. When faced with a large cliff you might climb it after cooking a massive batch of Stamela Shrooms to keep your stamina wheel from running out; or you might cut down a few hundred trees and stick them together into an improvised ramp. The real appeal of the game is in the sense of freedom. TotK will still punish mistakes and miscalculations, but it offers you a multitude of ways of tackling the problems that it presents.

Gacha mechanics, feedback loops and dopamine drips

Most video games succeed by merit of their hooks, their ability to keep you locked into them for hours. We seem to be getting to the end of a particularly irksome phase of game design where all the big studios were trying to release the game that you download for free and then play as your main game for years after that, occasionally paying for gear, cosmetics and expansions.

But there are other methods and genres that are designed to keep you playing. If you are a player of "freemium" mobile games then you are probably familiar with the gacha mechanic — games that start off by constantly rewarding the player with a sense of progress, albeit a very restrictive and linear one. Once you're hooked into that sense of progress the game hits you with a wall. You might have a timer that counts down to when you're able to play again with the opportunity to buy another go by watching an advert or spending in-game currency that was earned by installing other apps, sharing the game on social media or spending real world money. These games will also use slot machine mechanics where you might purchase loot boxes that could contain a rare upgrade or the same mid upgrade you've got from most of the loot boxes that you've opened thus far.

The gacha game's sophistication is in its design rather than in its gameplay experience. It will keep you busy but at the same time it will leave you drained. You might spend a few hours playing and come out of the other end of it feeling like you've put in a shift at a factory.

Other games might use similar mechanics of feedback loops and dopamine hits but in a less intense of punitive way. Survival/crafting games (like the excellent Planet Crafter) often function as dopamine drips, beginning with the player struggling to find food and water in an unforgiving environment which, through slow, incremental steps, leads to the player building elaborate, fully automated bases once the early survival mechanics have been overcome.

I have played a lot of these games and the real thrill of them comes from all those moments when you narrowly avoid death and when food and water become more available. Step by step, your character moves from precarity to godhood. However, it's normally after attaining the latter state that the game almost immediately becomes less interesting and I often fall off shortly after. While these games aren't as aggressive in their mechanics as the gacha games are, they still leave me feeling drained, even though they function as a steadily dosed dopamine drip.

There are of course many more kinds of video games, many that are more casual, cosy, geeky or intentionally punishing. My main point of providing these details is to illustrate that gaming may be a hobby but it is one that doesn't always feel recreational. TotK, in my first week of playing it, hasn't felt like this. Much like that nondescript white collar worker in the ad for the game that I embedded above, each little venture into the vast realm of Hyrule left me feeling energised and rewarded me in ways that didn't feel like the short, intense reward of a dopamine slot machine.

Grind and Graft

I think that the forms of labour and play that exist within games and how they reward the player, unconsciously influence my own attitudes towards work and recreation. If I'm spending my leisure time playing something that reinforces work and leisure as a cumulative series of repetitive tasks that lead to an achievement which is then immediately replaced by another achievement that requires more repetitive labour -- that attitude is going to influence my attitude to work in the real world. But TotK gives you the freedom to charge headlong into all the story missions or spend an hour chopping down trees and sticking them together for the sole purpose of pushing a cyclops off a cliff on the other side of a wide ravine. If anything, it is a given that you will be sidetracked from its ultimate goals and get lost in the giddy possibilities of play itself.

So my little theory is that a few nights of playful, exploratory freedom bled through into my work which became more playful within itself and less concerned with ultimate goals. I wasn't being productive, I was being creative.

So that's it, eh? All I have to do is play a little bit of Zelda every evening and hey ho, when I sit down to write the next day, the floodgates will open?

Not necessarily. If there's another thing that the last couple of Zelda games have taught me, it's this:

All tools must eventually break

There's a particular quirk with the current generation of Zelda games that hasn't been as universally acclaimed as the other aspects: weapon durability. Every weapon and tool in BotW and TotK has a certain number of uses before they inevitably break. Even the Master Sword, the excalibur of the Zelda series, needs to recharge every now and again, despite being otherwise indestructible. TotK takes the sting off this a little by allowing more opportunities for crafting weapons, but even those weapons will eventually break.

I mention this because I've been watching a lot of guides and reading up on the subject of ADHD (I keep procrastinating over approaching the NHS for a personal diagnosis). One thing that I found interesting, after researching a number of different productivity tools and hacks, is that in terms of ADHD, there is no silver bullet for getting stuff done. Something works until it stops working. Another technique gets results a little while later and then it stops working too.

You see what I'm getting at, all tools must eventually break. Therefore, I am reaping the whirlwind before conditions inevitably return to stagnancy. I will hopefully be more at ease with the inevitability of a system's obsolescence and the search for the next tool. It might be pomodorino timers or Red Dead 3 (because Red Dead 2 was the first game to truly get over my initial long term love of BotW).

Thank you for reading this,

Niall