October 2026
Here we are again. Back at the same table. Is the green felt of the casino comfortable or damning? It’s been 10 months since I’ve written and even longer since I’ve written about a videogame. I am moving my writing away from Substack finding it better suited for a blog rather than a review oriented newsletter as increasingly I found myself buying thing with the express purpose of writing about them. Which had me wondering what was even the point? Were my thoughts so loud that I needed the figleaf of a videogame to express them to strangers? Was the writing merely an excuse to pour hours into a game that was mid?
Balatro was indeed one of those games I originally purchased and played to write about.In 2025, I started playing Balatro. A roguelike deck builder that is built around the concepts of the game of poker. As the player continues their run through getting the requisite number of points to complete a a complete around, they upgrade their deck. They altered their cards to allow them to score more points at additional multipliers eliminate or change suits and they gain Jokers which alter how the game is scored. The only goal? Make Number Go Up and making number go up is really, really addictive. The gentle drone of the music of Balatro reminds me so strongly of a casino. There are no clocks in Balatro. When I would play it in the morning I would have to constantly check the time so the game did not make me late for work. The steady hum draws you in to a trance where there is just you and the chips you’re racking up.A friend describes the sound as “Casino Hell” which is apt considering its effect on people. Gambling would go so hard if it wasn’t going to be so horrible for me. Then I kept playing it over and over again. It and it’s haunt of a mascot Jimbo, the clown appearing on every joker art, was everywhere. Even in my phone while I was at work. To the point that I wanted to beat the game so much that I forgot about doing anything scholarly with it. “I wish what every addict wishes for: that what we love is good for us” -David Lynch.
I have been playing video games now for for almost my entire life. It has had its ups and downs. Some of them have been harmful to me. I joke about League of Legends being the worst thing on the planet for the human species. Some of them have been beneficial offerings. New perspectives on the world like Outer Wilds. Some truly incredible puzzles and story telling that can only be experienced once like Blue Prince. Some have even made me friends like Deadlock or Destiny 2 (articles to come I’m sure). Eventually the restlessness in my soul draws me to look for something else. What is so dangerous about platforms like steam is that by keeping a calendar of releases they allow me to plan the games that I purchase.
But there is always another game to play another set of rules to learn and another story or non-story to lose myself in completely. Playing videogames has always been a sort of refuge for me. Something I can do when there is nothing else. Roguelikes are certainly the most playable of games to serve this purpose. Games like Control Resonant I worry that I am not enjoying adequately unless I am in the right headspace. Roguelikes can be played badly while a podcast or a youtube video plays or a video capture renders. Which is a ridiculous thought process to have but here I was an alien to my own interests because I didn’t think I was enjoying games adequately.
Balatro to me is a game that will always be there in the back of my mind. When I first started playing it it was the only thing I did for a week and a half. I would go to work. I would play Balatro on my phone. I would come home and I would play Balatro on my computer. I liken this to smoking two packs a day. I mention David Lynch up top with his remarks about addiction. David Lynch is somebody who has had a profound effect on me with Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, True Romance and genuinely being a weird little freak. To this day I think of the phrase “Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it. Don’t wait for it. Just let it happen” as said by Twin Peaks’ Dale Cooper. Lynch was a smoker who thought about the vice a lot. You can see it in his corpus can also see it in his life and also his death in 2025. After Lynch’s death I began to take Lynch’s statement through Twin Peaks’ Dale Cooper a bit more seriously and started buying a lot of indie games, including Balatro.
Whenever I get a new game that just grabs me I latch onto it so strongly, grip it so tightly. It is like I have found something that actually makes me engaged and I am so afraid that I am going to lose it that I quickly break it and my grasp causes it to crumble to dust in my fingers. I am not and never have been someone who is capable of sipping his pleasures. When watching films I have to stop myself from looking up the plot and reception before the film even finishes and I say this as someone who watches two plus films in a week. This has been many a game to me as well, I remember spoiling myself on Blue Prince distinctly. Roguelikes are so Hit or Miss but unless they’re a Hades its infrequent for them to have spoilers. I have played now two dozen or more in this genre and all of them meet this fate. I will latch on to them because they have a novel idea but then they never truly transform anything. I had high hopes for things like Black Jacket (the source of the header image for this page) or Pathogenic but again I fell off. There has been a long list of the roguelike games I have played as an alternative to Balatro. When I got paid while I was a social worker I would once a week or so get myself a little something usually a game and think surely this time it will hit good. “Surely this time it won’t be mid” I said booting Slay the Spire after a long line of early access games other early access games that were dubious levels of finished. Surely this one, this one would be good and worth talking about?
Where is the line between being kind to myself and addiction and vice? I have depression that is co-morbid with ADHD. On a neurological level: I am missing two key neurotransmitters in the baseline amounts. Those that manage my attention and those that give me a chemical reward. I am naturally suited for video games. I am also more likely to exhibit patterns of addictive behavior. Does this mean I am an addict? I do not believe so. In my past work I’ve considered addiction to be a narrowing of the field of activities that give a person pleasure or relieve discomfort. To me videgoames have done both. Sure I enjoy being good at them and winning but that is for a discussion of Deadlock in the future. At my most cynical take I think what we’re all here for is neurotransmitters at the end of the day and my body likes to re-uptake serotonin very quickly. This is not set in stone and is not determined but it is a pattern that I have been aware of now for many years. There are some things I simply cannot allow myself to do: Smoke or Gamble. Even if smoking is, unfortunately, really cool and hot. Podcaster November Kelly has often joked that she’s waiting for “the cigarette that’s good for you” while Drag Queen Katya Zamolodchikova has stated on smoking: “It’s disgusting, don’t do it. Still it’s my favorite thing to do” and few things will match the catharsis displayed by Leigh Whannel lighting up in that horrible bathroom in Saw (which is about what a completed run in Balatro feels like). I also know that there are others who have situations far more dire than mine. A trainer at one of my old jobs often shared that he’d gotten fired at his past employment because he’d gotten addicted to World of Warcraft. I removed the game from my phone and computer several times looking to focus on other things
And again I returned to Jimbo. I have cleared many stakes on a number of different decks. My personal favorites are the abandoned deck and the ghost deck. Constancy of having only 40 cards and maximum chaos of always getting a random upgrade to a joker. I chase the clear on the gold stake with the abandoned deck purely for having done it. Will it satisfy me in a way other things haven’t? Voice actor and youtuber Sungwon Cho (aka ProZD) has a mission to 100% Balatro, one that he has completed after over 350 hours of playtime. Something that takes extreme commitment, especially building around the awful Obelisk joker. That is a kind of commitment that I just do not have within me, despite how much time I have logged on my phone with Jimbo, who is basically my boyfriend. Yet it has never truly gotten that dire. I haven’t missed work or life due to Jimbo taunting me to try again on a busted run.
What conclusion can I make from this, reflecting on a lifetime spent on playing various games? I can offer a hypocritical: “blow up your ps5 now” to the youth and advise them to steer clear of videogames, but there are far more damaging uses of a person’s time out there, and you and I both know that after I press the publish button I’m going to pay that damn clown another visit.
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