On Dots and Freedom
I’ve been playing a lot of Dots, the free-to-play iPhone/iPad game by Betaworks that involves connecting dots of the same color to get points.
my latest hoop dream is to be the best dots player in the world
— Walter Chen (@smalter) October 15, 2013
It’s sad to say, but one of the best feelings in the world is to make a number go up. It feels awesome to get a high score in Dots. The problem with that is classic – whenever you get a high score, you always want a higher score. While perfecting my Dots skills, I’ve discovered a longer-lasting, deeper pleasure from playing Dots: freedom from dots.
When you start playing Dots, every game feels individual and self-contained. You play a game of Dots with a timer. When the timer is up, the game is over. You start a new game, nothing carries over from the old game. But you quickly learn that’s not the case.
There’s actually a metagame of resource management in Dots. You can use power-ups to take your Dots game to the next level, but you have to “buy” those power-ups with dots, the virtual currency of Dots that’s persistent across all of your individual games. You earn dots for every point you get in your game, or you can buy dots using real cash. The problem is that the game is rigged so that if you want to play the game on a high level, you will progressively lose dots until you’re at zero.
For example, I’m regularly scoring around 500 points per game I play now, but that usually involves using one time-extension power-up and 3-5 shrinker power-ups. Each time extender is 200 dots and each shrinker is 100 dots which means I’m spending 500-700 dots to earn 500 dots every game. If I’m lucky, I’ll break even
What that means is that to keep playing at a high level, you either have to buy dots with money, or you have to “mine” dots–which amounts to playing games where you don’t use any power-ups and have no hope of getting a high score just so that you can accumulate dots and then play a few hardcore sessions. The problem with buying dots is that it makes you feel like a loser, and the problem with mining dots is that it’s extremely boring (and it makes you feel like a loser).
I admit, early on, I bought some 100,000 dots for $10. But I realized that wouldn’t be sustainable because I could spend 50,000 dots in two days. I despaired, and began to feel like I could never become the world’s greatest dots player.
I was a slave to dots due to my all-out style of play. I was addicted to growing my high score metric and I poured crazy resources into it every game by going to town on my power-ups. That meant that I was always operating near nil in dots which meant that I had to sit around for hours and mine dots to get my bankroll back up. As Miley Cyrus might say, I wasn’t running dots, dots was running we.
Then, something changed. I was getting stressed by constantly operating on at a loss, but more importantly, I was getting really bored. I decided to take a step back. Rather than push on my high score, I’d appreciate the beauty of dots, learn its intricacies, and listen to what it was trying to teach me.
I started to play a low-burn form of dots that emphasized creativity, insight and dexterity over raw score. After one game when I scored close to a high score, I discovered something surprising–I’d net-increased my dots while playing at a high level. What I found was unexpected and deeply gratifying: I was free from dots.