Stanley Parable’s co-designer perfectly explains why people play 1,600 hours of Dota 2 and still hate it

I have 1,284 hours logged in Dota 2 on Steam. Do I regret most of them? Absolutely. Stanley Parable Co-designer William Pugh recently explained the precise reasons for this.

He spoke to PC gamer about its conflicted relationship with online multiplayer and how that was reflected in various games, starting with 2005’s Verse 4: Chaos. He was asked which Steam game he spends the most hours logged in on and, unsurprisingly, it’s Valve’s consistently best-performing MOBA. Pugh has 1,603 hours Dota 2. More than even Fortress Team 2.

“It’s interesting because there’s no other game that comes close to that amount of time,” he said. “But if you ask me, ‘Did you have a good time playing Dota 2?’ The answer is “no”. The answer is “shit, this fucking game”. My teammates were feeding. They weren’t supportive. When I supported, my carries didn’t carry. There were people who were out of position. People who went too far, people who dived and had nothing to do with diving, people whose item choices were stupid.

It’s a feeling that will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has 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 as if I had just survived a game of Jumanji. When I tease my friends that we’re all re-downloading it, a dark silence engulfs the group chat.

Pugh continued:

Even thinking about it now, I have to turn on my fan. I’m a little sweaty and a little angry. I’ll say it, fuck everyone who plays Dota 2. If they’re good at this game, fuck them. They have no life and they should just get by. That’s what started all this AI shit. If you remember, OpenAI, one of their first things was to create a robot that could beat a pro.

This is not a game made of love. It’s a game fueled by hatred and the desire to win. It’s like chess. I played chess when I was a kid, and there are sweaty people playing chess. But at least you’re not playing chess with people and when you make a mistake they speak up and say, “Yo, that’s exactly how you’re messing up. Stop messing around and wasting an hour of my life.”

But I was never good, which is the saddest part. That you spend 1,600 hours of your life and you’re really not good at it. Damn, what a horrible game. I bet in your regular interviews someone says, “I spent 300 hours in this game that I love. When I experienced this personal tragedy, I played this game and it helped me cope. To me it’s like “Fuck Dota 2I hate it.”

According to Crows founder Crows Crows, what Valve’s MOBA does best is the focus it requires for players to keep all of its variables in their heads simultaneously. He compares it to “handing over a five-dimensional Rubik’s cube” that you spend an hour trying to solve. Succeed or fail, 60 minutes will have passed without any distractions. This calms the brain for a while until a wave of budding rage eventually takes everything away.

Even now, a sick part of me is still tempted to go back and play more. Dota 2. Thank goodness my hard drive is already full.