Games aren’t power fantasies. They’re reality repairers

Let’s start with something simple but weird: Game-related purchases account for 75 percent of App Store revenue. That means we spend three times more on play than we do on everything else combined. Three times more on games than on every dollar we dedicate to music and weather and productivity and photography and fashion and finance and cooking and maps and fitness put together. We’re 10 years in to paying for software experiences on our phones, and as sure as ever that games are where we get the best value. Why? What are we buying with that money?

There are a couple of conventional answers. Games for a long part of their history were derisively dismissed as power fantasies — escapist junk where you could pretend to be the spy or superhero or 40-foot tiger-wizard of your dreams. More recently, their hold on us has been described in terms of slot machine dynamics, driven by our human susceptibility to intermittent reward schedules designed into loot boxes and gacha prizes.