How YouTube got me addicted to Brutal Doom
I was chatting with friend, that is to say using an instant messaging application to send texts back-and-forth (what are we, savages to meet IRL?!), and I've sent him a link to a gameplay video of Brutal Doom, when he said something I thought was amusing: "hey man, you're obsessed with this game!"
LOL, right?
It got me thinking... it actually was like the 5th link to a Brutal Doom gameplay video from YouTube I've send him that week, and all of them were, you know, cool to view! Look at those lightning effects! The textures! The splattering gore! It is so much improved than the original! And it's free - not like the current definition of "free to play" where you have a demo version of a game and then pay to actually do something fun with it, but really free, in the "old-skool" way: you download it, it's yours. It doesn't even need Internet to run! It's so retro! But I digress...
Well, I like the genre, and I find it fascinating what people are actively doing nowadays, even in 2018, with the concept which is at this point ancient, but... obsessed?
Let's backtrack: why did I watch a gameplay video of this game almost every day? I have the game, I play it occasionally, but looking back at my YouTube play history, there's a disproportionate number of exactly these kind of video: Brutal Doom gameplays. Hmmm... how did that happen?
And I actually know how: I was looking for some computer-generated R&R and remembered that I didn't yet play the 2016 Doom game ... the "real" one, the much applauded sequel, so I booted Steam and with casual play, during a couple of weeks, I've finished it. Sometime in the middle of the single-player campaign I got frustrated with finding a secret hidden on one of the levels and I searched for tutorials on how to find it... which lead me to YouTube gameplays which specifically show how to get all secrets across all the levels. And I watch one of them, then another, then because I've searched for "doom", the Brutal Doom videos started popping up.
I knew about Brutal Doom for ages, and I played the older versions just fine, it was a good nostalgia trip, but now, the new and improved engine looked even better, slicker, gorier than before, so I watched one, then another...
What I'm aiming at is that soon, my list of YouTube recommended videos list was absolutely deluged with Brutal Doom gameplays. And I didn't even notice. I'd go to YouTube, look around if there's anything interesting from the channels I subscribe to, and if not, clicked on an unrelated video I thought was interesting... which, since these gameplays started appearing more and more often among the recommendations, was more and more often. And I didn't even notice.
That's an addiction pattern right there: it doesn't matter if it's with alcohol, drugs, gambling, overeating or whatever else, the pattern is generally the same, and the "I didn't even notice" part of it is probably a crucial part of it.
The worst thing is - I kind of like the videos.
----
This specific episode, in a nutshell, is an effect from behavioural analysis algorithms done by Google. They don't even have to be that sophisticated - a simple similarity search will do. Unfortunately, these automated biases are everywhere nowadays: when I search with Google, I get results customised to what the machine thinks I would like to hear. When I look at my Facebook feed, I get a list of posts optimised for the greatest possibility I'd react to them. I can't even find new music on YouTube and Google Play anymore because the search results show me exactly the type of music I've listen to in the recent past - and that's the last thing I currently want to.
Of course it's "my own fault" at the very direct level: it was me who clicked more and more on the videos I've seen on my YouTube home page, nobody forced me to. But still, this automated reinforcement of biases has gotten ridiculous.
This bubble of already-seen (or expected) content is death to variety.
How is a person supposed to grow and develop their tastes in a world like this?