This is a confession of sorts. I’m a grown man with a family. I have what most people outside of the comments section here would call a career. Occasionally, I am asked to go on television and comment on affairs of state. I own a tuxedo.
And yet, for precious minutes of every day, while various people are relying on me for various things, I’m on my iPad battling elite barbarians and skeleton bombers and a giant purple-eyed robot called a P.E.K.K.A., though no one seems to know what the letters stand for. Well, sometimes it’s precious minutes. Sometimes it’s … more.
I first wrote about the game “Clash of Clans,” made by the gaming behemoth Supercell, for the New York Times in 2013. My son, Ichi, was 8 then, and we had joined a clan together. This led me, ultimately, to fly to San Francisco to interview the No. 1 player in the world, who turned out to be an altogether lovely guy named George.
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A few years ago, Ichi introduced me to “Clash Royale,” a spinoff of the original. It’s sort of like 3D chess, but with dozens of pieces, all with their own abilities and weaknesses. (These days, I use an elixir golem with battle healer, in case you were wondering.)
Follow this authorMatt Bai's opinionsIchi quickly mastered the game and moved on to other distractions, such as actual chess and an electric guitar. I haven’t. In fact, I don’t want to brag, but I recently passed the 6,000-trophy mark, briefly surging to the top of my clan. I’m pretty sure my wife is more impressed than she’s letting on.
To be totally transparent, it’s not as though “Clash Royale” is the only game that interrupts my workflow. I’ve completed 1,732 consecutive Times crossword puzzles (not that anyone’s counting). I’ve played years of Scrabble games with online friends I’ve never met. I rarely miss a Wordle, or a Quordle.
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But all those pastimes have some professional value, or at least that’s what I tell myself. They’re word calisthenics. It’s entirely possible that one day, decades from now, a doctor will say to me: “It’s only because of Scrabble that you can still write coherently at 103.”
There’s nothing so redeeming about “Clash Royale.” The feeling of accomplishment you get from, say, upgrading your minion horde to Level 14 has no intellectual rationale. Your real life is no richer for having graduated from Serenity Peak to Legendary Arena.
No, the chief allure of “Clash” is that it’s always there. It takes three minutes to play a single battle, and at any time of the day or night, I can find a player in South Korea or Brazil who’s at my level and ready to go.
So there’s never an irritating commercial break I have to endure, no dull moment of waiting around for the Uber Eats guy to arrive, without the quick rush of a trophy push. The game is an ellipsis between moments, running constantly in the background of my life. Sometimes, I dream about it.
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That’s not to say it’s mindless or requires no concentration. On the contrary, it is nearly impossible to win a “Clash Royale” match while someone is talking to you, or while a certain puppy is thrusting its favorite toy in your face. And losing what you’ve gained can be intensely maddening.
A few years ago, I turned a friend of mine on to the game, and after months in which he dominated his clan, his fiancee finally made him delete it. The game affected his mood. I’d be lying if I said it never affected mine.
But what bothers me more about my “Clash” addiction is the way it obliterates idleness.
Back when I was a magazine writer working out of a newsroom some days, my colleagues who were daily reporters would sometimes chide me for staring out windows and generally doing nothing. “So this is what magazine writers do all day?” they might say, peering over between frantic phone calls.
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But, yes, that is precisely what a writer — or anyone who’s thinking deeply about anything — needs to do every so often: nothing. We’re all smarter for time spent staring out windows. We’re less self-certain for the minutes we lose pondering questions no one else can hear. Like every annoying insect in nature, boredom has its purpose.
And I wonder whether that might be a problem not just for me but for society as a whole. We have so many distractions — games, podcasts, Twitter, TikTok — that we’ve forgotten how to be with our thoughts. Maybe we talk at each other so incessantly and so thoughtlessly because we’re no longer able to find comfort in the intermittent silence.
This is hard to contemplate, but I’m thinking it might be time to delete the game and revel a bit more in the void, the way I used to. I might want to finish this season with a good run, though, just so I can go out on top.
Besides, the baseball playoffs are in full swing now, and that’s an awful lot of commercial breaks.
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