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.
He spoke to PC Gamer about his conflicted relationship to online multiplayer and how it’s been reflected across various games, beginning with 2005’s Worms 4: Mayhem. He was asked which Steam game he has the most hours logged in and, unsurprisingly, it’s Valve’s perennially top-performing MOBA. Pugh has 1,603 hours in Dota 2. More than even Team Fortress 2.
“It’s interesting because there’s no other game that even comes close to this volume 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 ‘fuck that fucking game.’ My teammates were feeding. They weren’t supporting. When I was supporting, my carries weren’t carrying. There were people who weren’t in position. People who went too far out, people who were diving who had no business diving, people whose item picks were stupid.”
It’s a sentiment that will feel instantly recognizable to anyone who’s 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’d 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.
Pugh continued:
Even thinking about it now, I’ve got to turn my fan on. I’m getting a little bit sweaty and a little bit pissed off. I’ll say it—fuck everybody who plays Dota 2. If they’re good at the game, fuck them. They’ve got no lives, and they should just get off it. It’s 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.
It’s not a game made of love. It’s a game fueled by hate and a desire to conquer. It’s like chess. I played chess as a child, and there’s sweaty people who play chess. But at least you’re not playing chess with people and then when you make a mistake, they get on voice and they’re like, “Yo, this is exactly how you’re fucking up. Stop fucking up and wasting an hour of my life.”
But I was never any good, which is the saddest fucking thing. That you spend 1,600 hours of your life and you’re not actually any good at it. Goddamn, what a horrible game. I bet in your usual interviews, someone’s like, ‘I’ve 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.’ For me, it’s like, “Fuck Dota 2, I hate it.”
The thing Valve’s 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 “handed a five-dimensional Rubik’s cube” 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.
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.