[gregopet]

I created a backend for a mobile game once. It was one of those typical mobile "get hooked" clones, with loot boxes, hard & soft currencies, the works. It was created to promote a sports club, one of the really big ones. I was mainly just programming other people's ideas (if I wanted to write a game it certainly wouldn't be something like that), but they needed help parameterizing loot chances and stuff like that, and I eagerly helped - I wrote mathematical formulas that fitted their descriptions & presented it to them and it was quite fun as opposed to the usual business software "data goes from A to B" boring crap.

At a certain point we had a tournament. The prize was surprisingly rich, the club gave something quite rare and unique. So people really played! We would watch on those fancy Grafana charts I programmed how people would play night and day. I wrote an SQL query that would track the habits of the top 3 players specifically and we would comment on the few breaks in their gaming spree: "food", "power nap", "ahah, toilet break!". For an entire week. They slept an hour here and an hour there, otherwise they played. I sure hope the poor bastard who won really got their memorabilia.

The game stopped soon after that, the club decided to ditch it (for whatever reason, my employer said it was club politics but who knows). I was a bit surprised at myself that I didn't feel any really strong emotions about it.. I mean sure, the worst of it was when they were going for a real prize, but anyhow I never had a true "Oh no what have I done" moment, even before I learned the app would be cancelled. Not an emotional one anyway, rationally I do realize that entire mechanics and the tournament you could win by staking all your free time is not great to say the least.