I have 1,284 hours on record in Dota 2 on Steam. Do I regret most of them? Absolutely. Stanley Parable co-designer William Pugh recently articulated the precise reasons why.<\/p>\n
He spoke to PC Gamer<\/a> about his conflicted relationship to online multiplayer and how it\u2019s been reflected across various games, beginning with 2005\u2019s Worms 4: Mayhem. He was asked which Steam game he has the most hours logged in and, unsurprisingly, it\u2019s Valve\u2019s perennially top-performing MOBA. Pugh has 1,603 hours in Dota 2. More than even Team Fortress 2.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s interesting because there\u2019s no other game that even comes close to this volume of time,\u201d he said. \u201cBut if you ask me, \u2018Did you have a good time playing Dota 2?\u2019 The answer is \u2018no.\u2019 The answer is \u2018fuck that fucking game.\u2019 My teammates were feeding. They weren\u2019t supporting. When I was supporting, my carries weren\u2019t carrying. There were people who weren\u2019t in position. People who went too far out, people who were diving who had no business diving, people whose item picks were stupid.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a sentiment that will feel instantly recognizable to anyone who\u2019s ever played more than a dozen hours of Defense of the Ancients 2. We feel it deep in our bones. I uninstalled the game years ago and buried the memory of it like I\u2019d just survived a game of Jumanji. When I tease my friends about all of us re-downloading it, a dark silence engulfs the group chat.<\/p>\n Pugh continued:<\/p>\n Even thinking about it now, I\u2019ve got to turn my fan on. I\u2019m getting a little bit sweaty and a little bit pissed off. I\u2019ll say it\u2014fuck everybody who plays Dota 2. If they\u2019re good at the game, fuck them. They\u2019ve got no lives, and they should just get off it. It\u2019s what started this whole AI shit. If you remember, OpenAI, one of their earliest things was they made a bot that could beat a pro<\/a>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not a game made of love. It\u2019s a game fueled by hate and a desire to conquer. It\u2019s like chess. I played chess as a child, and there\u2019s sweaty people who play chess. But at least you\u2019re not playing chess with people and then when you make a mistake, they get on voice and they\u2019re like, \u201cYo, this is exactly how you\u2019re fucking up. Stop fucking up and wasting an hour of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n But I was never any good, which is the saddest fucking thing. That you spend 1,600 hours of your life and you\u2019re not actually any good at it. Goddamn, what a horrible game. I bet in your usual interviews, someone\u2019s like, \u2018I\u2019ve spent 300 hours in this game that I love. When I had this personal tragedy, I would play this game and it helped me get through that.\u2019 For me, it\u2019s like, \u201cFuck Dota 2, I hate it.\u201d<\/p>\n The thing Valve\u2019s MOBA is best at, according to the Crows Crows Crows founder, is how much concentration it requires for players to hold all of its variables in their heads simultaneously. He likens it to being \u201chanded a five-dimensional Rubik\u2019s cube\u201d that you spend an hour trying to solve. Succeed or fail, 60 minutes will have passed completely distraction-free. It quiets the brain for a spell until a groundswell of inchoate rage eventually washes it all away.<\/p>\n Even now, a sick part of me is still tempted to go back and play more Dota 2. Thank god my hard drive is already full.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I have 1,284 hours on record in Dota 2 on Steam. Do I regret most of them? Absolutely.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":863694,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[364443,364444,74],"class_list":["post-863693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-dota-2","tag-stanley-parable","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=863693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/863694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=863693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=863693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=863693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}