Freedom Tycoon

Now and then a person makes a decision to restructure an area of their life. They may decide to start eating healthier or join a gym. It might be a decision to stop doing something. Stop smoking, stop gossiping or stop complaining about the boss. It might be a decision to tackle an issue in a new way or to start a household budget or join a new activity.

I recently made one of these decisions.

I uninstalled Idle Miner Tycoon from my phone.

For the last two months, I have played this game every single day. Many of those days, it was for hours at a time. And more than once a week, I stayed up almost all night playing it. Lots of toilet time as well.

The premise of the game is pretty simple.

You hire a miner to start mining a shaft. You hire another to operate the shaft elevator to carry the mined goods to the surface. You then hire a third to bring the goods to the warehouse where you get paid. Once you get money, you use the profits to hire more miners to get the minerals faster.

Now that the mines are producing faster, you need a bigger and more efficient elevator which leads to needing more guys to haul the stuff to the warehouse. With this bigger workforce, you are now raking in even more money than before which can be used to hire more guys and dig new shafts to further increase productivity. More productivity means more money. More money means you can upgrade even more. More upgrades mean more money which means more upgrades which means more money which means more upgrades…

It's an endless cycle.

However, being a sucker for math and numbers and figuring out formulas, I loved running the numbers and different scenarios to see which combinations of workers would produce the most profitable income. A few days after I downloaded the game I was excited to see that I was about to MAX out the stats on the mine. Yay! I had conquered the game.

However, just before I hit the top scores, I was notified that I had enough money to buy a second mine. I loved the challenge so I bought that second mine immediately. Within a few weeks, I was operating a total of five mines and had money just flying in.

I was a master at this game.

Or so I thought.

The next thing I know, new characters and perks were introduced to advance the productivity and efficiency of the game. A map popped up to show that the world I was in was much bigger and more complex than I thought. It was like watching Game of Thrones.

So, soon I had an entire mining empire on several different continents which had to be overseen each day. And I checked in each day to ensure things continued to run smoothly. I had the game running like a well-oiled machine, but the bigger it got, the more attention it required to keep earning at maximum profits.

Of course, the purpose of these incredible profits was to be able to expand into more areas of the map in order to dig more mines so I could make more money to hire more men to dig faster and deeper and help me to expand my empire so I could make even more money in order to open more mines so I could make more money.

I would get such a thrill over making enough money to open a new mine, but the new mine was only to make enough money to open another one. It took about six weeks for me to realize my obsession and the endless (and pointless) cycle to this game. The feeling of exhilaration was over something that was not even real and had no significant lasting effect other than wasting a lot of my time when honestly I can get the same feeling from opening a new bag of chips, but at least with a bag of chips, I can knock it out in about 20 minutes and immediately get started on the next one.

I deleted the game from my phone two days ago and am grateful to find myself with a lot more spare time. Now I'll be able to knock out the latest season of G.L.O.W. on Netflix.