Phil W. Bayles

Or: How I Learned I Have a Problem

I’m not one to make New Year’s resolutions. More accurately, I’m not one to keep New Year’s resolutions. I make all the usual promises: try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations. But I usually get the first takeaway of the year before Twelfth Night, and January’s too cold to go walking, and people of all creeds and nations are arseholes.

But this year, I’ve made the decision to give up one of the biggest drains on my time, my wallet and my sanity.

It’s called Two Dots, and it’s a stupidly addictive mobile game.

I can’t remember exactly when I first played it. Maybe I was at the doctor’s office. Maybe I was on a bus. Maybe I was sitting in a cinema, waiting for a film to start. Whatever I was going, I was clearly bored. So I decided to try a game to pass the time. And it was brilliant.

The design is clean and minimalist, and there’s something so satisfying about dragging your finger to make a line of coloured dots and watching them wink out of existence. It starts off simple, but things ramp up quickly. There are fire dots that spread if you don’t extinguish them; monkeys that need to be fed; blocks of ice that need to be shattered. And as it gets harder and harder to play, it gets harder and harder to turn it off.

I used to see adverts for other, similar games – neon-coloured monstrosities with floating candies and flashing lights – and scoff. You’d never catch me playing one of those awful eyesores, especially since they’re designed to get poor gullible players to keep paying money for just one more life, or one more power-up to beat that particularly difficult level. Two Dots was a classier game than that, I thought. It was stimulating my brain. Of course, I did end up spending money on it. Not a lot: only a couple of quid, a couple of times. But I’m sure I would have spent it a couple of times more.

Slowly but surely, I started to spend more and more of my day staring at those stupid dots. They were the first thing I’d think about in the morning, and the last thing I’d think about at night. I’d watch them while I was supposed to watch TV. I even caught myself playing on the toilet more times than I care to admit.

I can’t tell you when I started playing Two Dots, and I can’t rightly tell you what made me stop. I was sat in front of Only Connect this week, trying to clear one particularly fiendish level involving flowers, asteroids and a black slime that spread with every turn, and a small voice somewhere in the back of my head piped up: “Stop playing that rubbish and pay attention.” (I don’t know when my inner voice started sounding exactly like my Dad, but that’s a question for another day.) So I stopped. I quit the app and uninstalled it. And I haven’t regretted it once.

Now I realise that Two Dots wasn’t training my brain at all; it was numbing it. It was like a digital pacifier; something I could use to relax my brain if I didn’t want to think about anything too taxing. And all it cost me was way too much of my time and attention. Frankly I feel stupid for being sucked in by it for so long. Instead I’ve gone back to doing the New York Times crossword every day on my phone, which actually does stimulate my brain; even if the American spellings of words like “colour” and “centre” sometimes threaten to give me an aneurysm. 

I know I have an addictive personality, and there’s every chance that I’ll get the overwhelming urge to return to Two Dots in the weeks or months to come – especially since we’re all stuck indoors looking for ways to entertain ourselves. But if I do, I have a plan: I’ll just imagine my Dad staring over my shoulder and shaking his head. Then I’ll roll my eyes at him, put my phone away and go back to watching TV.