The Mobile Gaming Mirage

It happens once a month on average. There's this hot new mobile game. Everyone's talking about it. Somehow I see it everywhere.

So I download it, launch it... and within two minutes at most, I'm stabbing the Uninstall button like it owes me money. (If it's a game with an on-screen joystick, it's gone in two seconds.)

The cheap plastic graphics. The coin-collecting sound that scrapes my brain like fingernails on a blackboard. The almost immediate popup inviting me to upgrade something I haven't even understood yet.

This scene repeats monthly, weekly sometimes.

Each time I wonder if I'm becoming a gaming curmudgeon, resistant to change and innovation. I'm firmly in my 50s now.

All of us over 30, I think, should be mobile gaming's perfect audience. We're time-starved and easily interrupted. We're supposedly grateful for any gaming scraps we can get between work and family obligations.

The industry has handed us the solution: quick, accessible games designed for stolen moments, played on the mobile devices we have always in our hands.

So why do so many of us detest mobile gaming like it's elevator music for our thumbs?

The Promise vs. The Reality

Mobile games promise convenience, but deliver compulsion. They're built not around our limited time but around extracting maximum engagement from it. Every mechanic is calibrated to create dependency rather than satisfaction. Where we once had complete experiences in finite packages, we now get endless treadmills disguised as progress. My italics.

The psychological architecture is all wrong. We grew up with games that respected our intelligence and investment.

We expected to master systems, uncover secrets, and earn genuine accomplishments.

Mobile games offer the simulation of these things. Progress bars that fill, numbers that increment, achievements that celebrate nothing meaningful.

The Scarcity Paradox

Gaming was better 30 years ago when there were fewer games, but not for the reasons you might think.

It wasn't about quality over quantity. Plenty of terrible games existed in every era.

The difference was the scale of our commitment, born out of limitation.

Back when we owned at most two or three games, we lived inside them.

There was nothing else. Either you played those two or three games, or you played nothing at all.

You discovered every secret, mastered every technique, formed genuine relationships with virtual worlds.

Scarcity forced depth. You couldn't just abandon a challenging section and move onto something else. There wasn't much else. Not enough to remove you.

This created a different relationship with difficulty and investment. Games could assume you'd stick around long enough to understand their deeper systems.

They could front-load complexity, because they knew you weren't going anywhere.

The Attention Economy Problem

Modern gaming operates in an attention economy where every game competes with every other form of entertainment. This has optimized games for immediate gratification rather than lasting satisfaction.

Mobile games especially are designed like digital slot machines.All feedback loops and no meaningful progression.

For aging gamers, this creates a particular kind of alienation. We remember when a game was a complete thought rather than a set of engagement metrics.

What We Actually Want

We don't want games that are necessarily easier or harder games—we want more respectful ones. Games that assume we're intelligent, that value our time rather than trying to waste it, and that offer genuine accomplishment rather than participation trophies.

There are some mobile exceptions that work. For me those games have been Angry Birds and Polytopia.

(I picked Angry Birds to prove I'm not a gaming snob. Gaming can just be about iterating on a pleasing mechanic, and Angry Birds delivered that.)

These games and their few brethren succeed because they remember that games can be complete experiences. They have beginnings, middles, and ends. They don't mistake engagement for entertainment.

The Real Solution

The answer isn't accepting mobile gaming's compromises or retreating into nostalgia.

It's recognizing that changed circumstances don't require fundamentally different games. Just different approaches to the games we love.

We need to accept that completing fewer games thoroughly is better than sampling many games superficially.

Maybe we need to actively seek out the patient, complete experiences on mobile that do still exist, rather than settling for the convenient, hollow ones with the best PR teams.

The mobile gaming revolution promised to democratize gaming, but democracy shouldn't be shorthand for dumbing down. We deserve games that challenge us, respect us, and reward our investment. Even if we can only spare 20 minutes at a time.