The low hum of the console is the only sound. My thumbs are hovering over the analog sticks, but they aren’t moving. On the screen, a magnificent, sprawling fantasy world is paused. A world of mythic beasts and ancient secrets, frozen in time because my ‘Pouch of Endless Holding’ can, in fact, only hold 72 items, and I am currently at 72. A glowing red message informs me of this fact with the kind of digital indifference only a user interface can muster. My quest is to slay the Shadow Wyrm of Mount Ash, but my current, more pressing mission is to decide whether the ‘Slightly Chipped Goblin Tooth’ is more or less valuable than the 42 ‘Bundles of Assorted Moss.’

This is the moment the magic dies. The immersion scatters.

The grand adventure grinds to a halt, replaced by a sudden, unwelcome descent into administrative logistics. The game ceases to be a portal to another reality and becomes a spreadsheet. Each item has stats, weights, values, and potential crafting uses that I have to cross-reference in my head or in a wiki open on my phone. It’s a tedious process of optimization that feels unnervingly similar to sorting through a cluttered email inbox or deciding which household expenses to trim. It is, for all intents and purposes, paperwork.

I’ve heard the arguments defending this. It’s called ‘depth’. It’s ‘resource management’. It’s for the ‘hardcore’ player who appreciates complex systems. And for a long time, I believed it. I told myself that the satisfaction of a perfectly organized inventory was part of the reward. I once spent an entire Saturday-I think it was 12 hours straight-doing nothing but organizing a color-coded series of chests in a crafting game, and I felt a disgusting sense of accomplishment. I was a master logistician. A king of digital tidiness. Then I stood up, my back aching, and realized I had spent my one day of freedom for the week performing a task that a warehouse inventory clerk gets paid $22 an hour to do.

Depth is learning the attack patterns of a difficult boss. Depth is uncovering a hidden narrative thread that re-contextualizes the entire story. Depth is mastering a movement mechanic that lets you glide through the world with grace and skill. Comparing the +2 Stamina bonus of the ‘Orcish Greaves of Moderate Stench’ against the +2 Agility of the ‘Elven Slippers of Questionable Durability’ is not depth. It’s a math problem with pictures. It’s the unpaid internship of fun.

I was talking about this with my friend Hiroshi S. He’s a financial literacy educator, a man whose entire professional life revolves around spreadsheets, projections, and optimizing portfolios. You’d think he would be the last person to enjoy this kind of thing, but for years he was its biggest defender. He called these games “spreadsheets with dragons,” and he loved it. He would spend hours theory-crafting the most efficient builds, calculating damage-per-second down to the second decimal, all with a kind of joyful focus. It was his way of relaxing. Or so he thought.

The joy had been replaced by obligation. His hobby had become a mirror of his labor.

I’ll be the first to admit my own hypocrisy. I complain about this friction, yet I have fallen prey to it more times than I can count. There’s a part of our modern brain, conditioned by a culture of relentless optimization, that finds a strange comfort in these tasks. We’ve been trained to believe that if something is complicated and requires meticulous organization, it must be important. We’ve gamified our work lives with productivity apps and metrics, so it’s only natural we’d start working in our games. We seek out systems that allow us to feel productive even in our leisure, a quiet testament to how deeply the logic of labor has infiltrated the last bastions of true play. The game designers aren’t entirely to blame; they’re just giving a market what it has been trained to crave.

But a counter-movement is growing. A quiet recognition that the purpose of play isn’t to replicate the cognitive load of our jobs, but to offer a genuine escape from it. It’s a design philosophy centered on respecting the player’s time and mental energy, focusing on flow states instead of stat calculations. These experiences understand that a game’s value isn’t measured in the number of systems it can pile on, but in the quality of the feelings it evokes. Thankfully, more creators are prioritizing this, resulting in some truly wonderful Cozy Games on Nintendo Switch that understand relaxation is about removing burdens, not adding new, more colorful ones.

This isn’t an argument against all complexity. Games can and should be challenging. They should demand skill, intelligence, and perseverance. But the challenge should be in the playing, not in the pre-play administration. The obstacle should be the dragon, not the menu you use to equip the sword to fight the dragon. The mental heavy lifting should be about solving a clever environmental puzzle, not about figuring out which of your 42 identical grey rocks you need to discard to pick up a quest item.