How Gamified Training Tackles Gambling Harm In Modern Gaming

What happens when gambling leaves the casino and slips into our favorite games, our phones, and even our goals? We pull back the curtain on how chance-based mechanics shape behavior, from WWE 2K card packs and loot boxes to trophy-hunting grinds that quietly mimic slot machines. Along the way, we share a rare look at a two-year project brought to life: a 60-CEU, fully gamified clinical training that turns counseling concepts into interactive minigames, including a Super Nintendo–style “Casino Escape” and a prevention planner that forces tough tradeoffs to win funding.

We talk candidly about being gambling neutral—centering what works for the individual, not blanket judgments. That means helping people set limits that stick, interrupt chasing losses, and understand why a “win” on a pack often feels huge even though it only returns pixels. We map the new terrain of smartphone betting, fantasy platforms, and prediction markets, and how economic pressure and side hustles can nudge rational people toward irrational risks. If you’ve ever told yourself “one last pull,” this conversation gives you language and tools to regain control.

It’s not all heavy. We trade Baldur’s Gate wipe stories, dip into SWOTOR events, celebrate a Royal Rumble prediction streak, and reflect on how practice and precision—hello, Resident Evil S-ranks—build real skills like patience, aim, and focus. The through line is simple: games can enrich our lives when we choose the terms. Set your budget before you start, pick a stop time while calm, celebrate early wins by walking away, and swap luck-loops for skill goals that give lasting satisfaction.

If this resonates, subscribe and share with a friend who loves games as much as you do. Drop a rating and tell us your best strategy for stopping after “one last pull”—we’ll feature our favorites next week.

Transcript

Opening Banter Without Marcus

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So the neat thing about tonight is we are legally obligated to make fun of Marcus per the instructions of Marcus.

SPEAKER_01 0:09

We have been given instructions we must make hey, we could talk without getting interrupted.

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Oh wow. Yeah, that's true. And then we don't have to explain the deeper meaning of us commenting on his choice in hat wear.

SPEAKER_02 0:24

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Because every time I comment on his hat, he gets so confused. Like he's forgotten that he's wearing a hat.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

Yes, we are Sans Marcus this evening.

Training Casino Staff To Support Gamblers

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Yep. And I am fresh back from training casino employees in South Florida to understand how to support people who may be showing in public some signs that their gambling choices are not working very well. There's actually a program that I'm in charge of right now, alongside Jenny, also from the show. And that's one of the things we do in our work now is we actually go to these gambling venues and we train the employees to provide customer service and mild amounts of listening support to people just to break that flow and end that cycle of bad decisions and give them a chance to get the fun back in their day.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

So not to get into not to go into a whole lot of detail since you did spend the better part of your week doing that for your real job. Yeah. In a nutshell, how does that fit in with video gaming and other mini-games that can be within video games?

Gambling Neutrality And Games With Chance

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Gambling is one of the original games, if you look at human history. Like we've been gambling is a way to make things that are boring to look at, maybe a little entertaining to look at, but we've we learned thousands and thousands of years ago in human evolution that if you pair some kind of a bet on something that you're not involved in, it's a lot more fun to watch it. And so in video games, yeah, so video games take that shortcut all the time. And I just want to say that I don't look at gambling like it's automatically a bad thing. My organization, Kindbridge, is what we call gambling neutral, meaning if it's bad for you, we will help you create a strategy that helps you overcome how bad it is for you. And if it's fun for you, we don't have to talk about it very much because it's working for you and there's no consequences. So let's focus on what you actually need to focus on. It's not going to be a distraction for us. And so inside video games, if there's a slot machine minigame or if there's some kind of card game that you have to play in order to advance certain main quests or side quests, theoretically that could be okay. And I just don't want any of our listeners to get confused about what my message is or anything like that. Because there are I I talk about the psychology of video games for a living, and there's a lot of people that do try to jump the gun and assume that I represent something before they hear the words that come out of my mouth.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

I know you shared it in your Discord, but what's special about this particular type of online training?

SPEAKER_00 3:38

Oh my gosh, the online training is a separate thing. And Drios, you said something that kind of tickles me. I just want to call it out so that our listeners start to understand where my headspace is at. You called what I did at the casinos earlier this week my real job. Kindbridge actually encourages me and reminds me that the other content that I make that most people would say is a hobby or a passion project or just for fun.

SPEAKER_01 4:09

Prison sentence.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

The fact that yeah, yeah, that's also my real job. There's this online training I've been building for almost two years that is designed to give people 60 continuing education units. We call those CEUs.

SPEAKER_02 4:24

CEUs, yeah.

Building A 60-CEU Gamified Course

Casino Escape And Minigame Design

SPEAKER_00 4:25

And you need to get C Yeah, you have to get CEUs in the mental health field every two years. You have to turn those into your state so you can keep your license active to show that you're learning current information and you're not outdated treating people in their counseling sessions in 2026 as if it's 2006. And so that's one way they make sure you're updating your knowledge every two years. And so I've been building this training, and Pinebridge didn't just want me to build a training, because I've built this training or something on this scale from an information perspective. I built it for my past job in Florida, where I met Jenny, and I also built it in the state of Arizona in a very basic sense, but it was a solo effort there. And Kindbridge wanted me to do it for them, but they wanted to make it fun. So it is a gamified clinical training in gambling counseling. And what I posted in my Discord yesterday, which by the way, if you want to join my Discord, just go to my Twitch page, hit follow just to be nice. But the link to join my Discord and be part of the online gaming community under the Dr. Gamology brand, it's right there in my list of links on my Twitch page. So twitch.tv slash Dr. Gamology. And you can join Discord and you can actually chat with me and Doritos and Marcus and all the regulars and all the people that make this community great. We're all in there. Some days are really active, some days I just am going in there saying work is destroying my work-life balance. But I posted some fun little 8-bit to 28-bit kind of graphics that are in a mini-game in the training. When you're doing school, you get quizzes and they're multiple choice, and you need to pick the correct answer. Right. In this training, the questions are hallways in a casino, and it looks like Super Nintendo graphics, and you get to actually play as me. I'm the character. And a casino. Yeah, I'm it's the name of this mini-game is called Casino Escape. And there's a series of seven multiple choice questions, and every question is on the top of the hallway wall, and there's three doors, and the doors are the multiple choice answers. And you have to walk Doc me to the correct door and enter it by pressing enter. And then you get a reveal of either the excited doc who just figured out something cool because you're gambling in a healthy way with your answer, or you're making a bad choice that's gonna lead to a gambling problem, and you see a very defeated version of Super Nintendo Doctor Gameology me. And when I played the early build of this game, there were no graphics, there was no animation for entering the door, it was just a hallway with questions and a preliminary pixel art of me. And I liked it because I've never thought to myself in a boring old counseling training, this would be so much fun if we turned it into a Super Nintendo game. But they did it for me, and so the final build, like we're in patch land for the training now, like the it's built from beginning to end, all the content. Last week I recorded 20 videos myself and edited them, did B-roll, put the captions and transitions and everything, and really got back in tune with the way I felt in life back when I was focusing on YouTube instead of Twitch. And I've really been thinking a lot about where's that balance between live content like on Twitch and things that I can do on YouTube, which YouTube would be like a middle spot between the podcast and Twitch because the podcast has gone like in more of a casual direction. Like we don't necessarily plan out topics a week in advance like I used to do. With YouTube videos, you have to plan everything, at least the style of talks that I do. And maybe that's not true. Maybe we do get to the point where I just say, I have an eight-minute video in me, I hit record, and then I go into my clips and my screen recordings of games I've played, and I just put that over it and see what happens. I really just want to get back to the point where I stop making excuses for my YouTube channel and I start using it again. Oh, you'll get there, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

Yeah, it's a it but it's a time commitment, and hey, you you'll get there. Not a big deal.

SPEAKER_00 9:30

Yeah, I think probably building a 60 CEU training is interfering with my ability to focus on Twitch and YouTube.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

Training being your next book.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

Will the training be in my next book?

SPEAKER_02 9:43

It's a video game. I think play it, right?

unknown 9:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:47

Yeah. I don't think I'm gonna make any references to the Kinebridge behavioral health online gambling training. Because it's not like it's not gonna be on Steam.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

It's gonna be no, it's it's a training thing, it's gonna be be isolated to that.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

Mm-hmm. Yeah, but every activity where it could be like flashcards, they've gamified it and turned it into something where you get a really strong feeling of wow, I I couldn't believe it. I'm reviewing it and seeing what the the game developer people did with my PowerPoints and stuff, and they just focused in on clusters of slides and was like, what's the game inside of this? And it's so neat. Like I was talking about prevention programs, and they made this mini game where there's a grant proposal board, and you have 12 cards of facts about gambling on the screen, and not all of them are true, and they're in different they're in different categories, like some of the facts are about demographics, some of them are about public health issues, some of them are about family dynamics, and you have to pick five cards to assemble your argument that your program should get funded. And based on what cards you pick is how persuasive your grant proposal is and how funded you get to create your program. I was just like, this is literally just facts from my PowerPoint mixed with lies. And they're testing if you were paying attention to the video that just played, really. The first playthrough I I took of this minigame. My my grant proposal was fully funded, Doritos, so I'm the answer key.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

Got all the answers that I spoke behind you.

Content Balance: Twitch, YouTube, Podcast

SPEAKER_00 11:41

I wanna thanks for giving me a little bit of time on the show today to kind of share that victory lap. It really has been two years of anxiety in the background of everything I do, and I've had a lot of fun moments in those two years with Twitch community grew dramatically, and we restarted the podcast and all that kind of stuff. And the thing that I'm worried about on a work level during all of that is this training. So the fact that I can go into my learning system and actually play it is a lot of fun. Also, it's just really wild that it's an educational program, and I just said that I have to play it. Right. But what have you been up to in your in the gaming side of life, Doritos? I haven't got to talk to you since last Thursday.

SPEAKER_01 12:32

Yeah, no. Last after last week, you and Marcus both vanished for real life things over the weekend. That's fine, it's what it happens. I haven't done anything super exciting. I'm just keep chipping away at Baldur's Gate. Keep I keep dying quite a lot, going, that didn't work. I I've lost count of how many TPKs I've had now. I I left. That idea was bad. Let me try to get it. So it's TPK total party kill. Total party kill. Okay. I'm only using the base party, so it's you put character you play plus three others. So I said it's okay.

SPEAKER_00 13:07

You gotta be able to get achievements. I do actually regret very much that I put over 80 hours into the game.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

But you gotta go back and turn all mods off. So if different dice or anything, it's gonna see it as a mod, and it's gonna say, oh no, you don't get that. So I'm like, that's okay. I've got cosmetic and a couple of die mods added. So I'm learning the system, and I will probably go back and play it again as a different character. And I made a character for when we do our when you know you me and Marcus all get together and do uh do our little campaign. So I've got a character built for that. So we'll see how that goes. Should it happen?

SPEAKER_00 13:47

That is gonna be really fun, but I'm really curious what Marcus's dynamic is gonna be playing with other people. I think it'll be alright.

SPEAKER_02 13:57

Well, I do too. I just think it'll be fun.

SPEAKER_01 14:00

It will but again, I did I did look at and we had a question that does have crossplay, and you can group in cross-play, so that works out for all of us on the platforms we want. Yep. So that'll be fun.

SPEAKER_00 14:12

Yeah, I probably will create a new character this week with no mods, and just mentally I'll be prepared for the idea that my outfits are gonna be really awful for most of the game.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

Let's see what else have I played. I've been playing SWOTOR, obviously. Let's see. This past week over the weekend, trying to think if there was an event last week. I don't think there was this week, it's Rat Ghoul Week Space Zombies in SWOTOR the week. So all the fun that comes with that. Other than that, still have you explode on people in the Imperial. Yeah, that's still a thing. Oh, I've got the I got the hidden achievement. There, there were we had a small uh Discord community where we were focused on getting hidden achievements like that, where we would it's all kind of group up and knock out those type of achievements. So that was fun. That community just died away over over the last several years because once everybody started getting the achievements, it's like now what type of thing.

SPEAKER_00 15:10

Yeah, that's true. It's important in a game like that.

Gamifying Prevention And Grant Choices

SPEAKER_01 15:16

Yeah. Exactly. Trying to think if I've have I played anything else. I think that's that that has consumed a majority of my game time. I know my son wants to he's so my son did finish Hollow Knight. Yeah, really cool. He wanted me to he I had to go watch him defeat the final boss in that, and he did it in four polls. Wow, really good. So I was super proud of him for that. He was all stoked and like super happy that he was able to accomplish that. So again, I got to see the and I got to see the ending for that, and uh yeah, that was fun to watch him do that. So I think he sank almost 60 hours into the game.

SPEAKER_00 16:04

Wow, is that how long it takes to beat the game?

SPEAKER_01 16:07

No, when you're 12, probably. I don't know. I haven't probably sick a whole of it. So I've been more letting him play it because I'm doing it on a family Steam account. So when you do that, it's the token base, so only one person can play it at a time. So it's if he wants to, it's like we can't play it at the same time, so I've been letting him enjoy that. So I may actually play it some this weekend finally, since he's now done with it. Okay, I know that he and his sister both have Stardew Valley, and he wants me to come in and help play with him a little bit. So I'm like, that's fine. Let me see if I can download it. Because he and his sister both have a copy of it. I can it's in our family share group. Now it's just in two tokens now instead of one token, so I can go ahead and download it, and two of us can play versus just one.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

So that's nice. That's really cool, and that really does emphasize that gaming can be a family activity and it also can be a community activity because almost all the situations you're talking about, except for what you're doing currently in Baldur's Gate, those are multi-person experiences. But even Baldur's Gate, you had also in there the plan for it to become a multi-person team experience. So we would that's a neat part. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:30

And Baldur's Gate is it's not an MMO, so it is limited, so I think a four four-person party total. So you know that works well to be able to do that. So then if you have your small group stuff, and if you want to do an MMO, there are plenty of them out there that are all a lot of good ones. But other than that, yeah, yeah. So question I have is, and we chatted about this right before we we got got going. Gambling in video games. If somebody is trying to say use video games as a substitute or a release instead of actually going to gamble, and they are offered a mission or an opportunity to gamble in a game, which is one just in-game currency, but there are some games I know Swordor has it, that you can payroll money, get credits, and then turn around and get the gambling tokens and do the actual gambling in-game for real life. How does that differ or impact the type of training that you did this week?

Doritos’ Gaming: Baldur’s Gate And SWOTOR

SPEAKER_00 18:53

When I had to check in at security, the security officer on day two actually talked to me about this because for them they're in a casino, so the types of games people play there, those are traditional gambling experiences: slot machines, poker, blackjack, roulette, these are all the traditional gambling games. And he just asked, How is it different now? Because a lot of the guys that he talks to, they're talking about how their time at the casino is a small part of their gambling now because they're doing fantasy sports, they're doing all kinds of online casinos on their phone, they're playing apps that have loot box or slot machine kind of dynamics to them, and you're paying with real money to make each play, each button press is a play, and so you don't have to drive to a casino anymore and spend your whole day there in order to gamble the entire day away. And that's really a tough thing to treat because the beginning part of my career as a counselor and working with people who gamble, we would talk in the first session or second session about can you take a different route home from work so that you don't pass the casino, you don't see it, you don't have that temptation. But that doesn't matter anymore because the gambling's happening on their smartphone. I haven't got plenty of apps out there.

SPEAKER_01 20:25

And you got plenty of apps out there, and I'm not sure anybody who's watched any sporting event has seen some of them. Everybody knows everybody's familiar with the fantasy sports apps and the fan duel and those apps, which I'm sure compounds the difficulty of that type of training. But now you have apps like CalShi, where it's not just a sporting event, it's an anything. It's if somebody has the desire to want to gamble on whatever it is. And for me, I'm not going to do that, but I'm having a difficult time seeing where that leads us in a societal direction, but that's creating a culture where in a few years that may be a source of income, is just betting on will the light turn red in five minutes, or how what's the countdown for the light turning green so I can go to the grocery store and you end up gambling on the way to the grocery store without ever having to leave your car because it's right there on your app, on your phone.

SPEAKER_00 21:40

Yeah, this is a greater societal issue, is really at the end of the day, the average person with a normal job that lines up with their work experience, their education, and whatever is not earning enough money to have a reasonably comfortable lifestyle. And that's led to side hustles becoming like anything you can think of can become monetized if you use the internet in certain ways. And so Calchi is just one example of the need to earn more money when you don't have resources to earn that money the traditional way, like employment. Right. And the problem with these side hustles is it actually lets employers off the hook because every employer knows what it costs to live comfortably in the city where they are hiring people.

SPEAKER_01 22:45

Right.

Crossplay Plans And Family Gaming

SPEAKER_00 22:45

Okay. And then they look at the kind of work they're asking people to do, and then they set this position is valued at this much to the company. And then HR's job is to convince qualified applicants that they're interested in hiring to accept less than that. And so you have this problem where society, in order to function, has to employ people to work under the threshold of comfortable living. And 2026 is very different than the 1950s because the idea for that standard of living was we will hire one person in this household to pay for the entire family and have a comfortable living. And now the goal of every corporation is we will hire one working capable person in that family and aim to pay them 30% or 40% what it costs to live comfortably for that family. Even if both romantic partners in a nuclear family are working, if they both have jobs where they accepted that 30% comfortable living standard of payment, then your family is earning 60% of what it takes to live comfortably in your city. And that means one or both people have to engage in side hustles to find that other 40%, which is going to lower your mental health, it's going to exhaust you, it's going to lead to medical complications, heightened stress, risk of heart disease. You won't be able to fit healthy things into your life like rest, relaxation, exercise. You're probably eating less healthy because there's less time for food prep. You know, it the reason people gamble is because they get this idea of how much money it would be nice to have in their head, and maybe they win at a gambling game. They realize this is fun, but it's also easy, and it's also way more financially lucrative than working a second job that pays$13 an hour. Right. And so gambling feels like a solution, but then it starts taking everything from you. That was a really long-winded answer, but I really feel passionately about what gambling does to societies, and that at the end of the day, it's hard to find employers that will hire you and want you to thrive also outside of the work base.

SPEAKER_01 25:28

Yeah, totally. And again, and I've seen those apps and going, I keep in mind how does that impact what you're doing and how you are having to go about your career because it's a big thing.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

Yeah. I just want to say with Kulchi, sports are in there, and I actually have a I have a big brag. By the time this episode comes out, the Super Bowl will already have happened, but the Super Bowl is in a couple days from now. One of the biggest gambling days of the calendar year. And lots of harmful things happen with people on that night. There's an increased domestic violence because of alcohol intake, plus financial stress from the betters who lose their bets. And there you can bet on so much more than just the outcome of that game, and especially the halftime show, the Star Spangled Banner. But I want to talk about a different very important sporting event. We've talked about several episodes in a row, Doritos, and it is truly a shame that Marcus is not here. Ha no professional wrestling. The Royal Rumble happened last weekend.

SPEAKER_01 26:41

That's right. It did happen this past weekend.

Real-Money Betting Versus In-Game Gambling

SPEAKER_00 26:44

And I would just like to refresh your mind, Doritos, that a certain Dr. Daniel Kaufman, aka Dr. Gamology, predicted Liv Morgan would win the Women's Royal Rumble, and Roman Reigns, the OTC, is going to win the men's Royal Rumble. And would you like to guess with the tone of my voice being what it is, what happened on Saturday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia?

SPEAKER_01 27:13

I wonder.

SPEAKER_00 27:17

Liv Morgan won the Women's Royal Rumble, and Roman Reigns won the men's Royal Rumble. And just put your fingers up in the air for the tribal chief and for me, because I don't gamble, but that's a really good feeling because Marcus was so skeptical when I said Roman Reigns. And not only are we making fun of him for not having control of his schedule, but we're also making fun of him because he did not predict the Royal Rumbles like me.

SPEAKER_01 27:50

No, did his kids get it though? They have that he had that family pool going on. I wonder who if Rhino better on the on predicting than Marcus did. I'm sure he did. Kids tend to know, have that innate, whatever it is. I don't know what it is.

Gambling Moves To Smartphones

SPEAKER_00 28:08

But kids know. Yeah, so I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about that next episode when we get Marcus back. But yeah, WrestleMania season is so good. I love it, and I love the I love professional wrestling because it really is like real-life superheroes doing stories like soap opera level, but with fighting. And also the video games, segueing back into what we're talking about tonight. I have actually talked about my faction mode in the WWE 2K series, which is a it is a mini-game mode where you have to spend money to open packs of wrestlers, and these packs have different gemstone levels that indicate their strength. So it's not just get the wrestler you like. I love Roman Reigns, he's probably my favorite wrestler right now that's doing it. But having a Emerald class Roman Reigns is not as good as having a pink diamond version of Roman Reigns. And so that's how they get you might have exactly the group of five wrestlers on your team that you want. Actually, it's four. Sorry, it's been a while since I've done this mode. So you open packs of five in the card packs, and these cost money to open them. And so you get random wrestlers, and you have the odds listed, like in gambling venues. So you know when you open a pack that this particular pack has 37% chance of a bronze card, and then 24% of a silver, 12% of a gold, eight percent of a emerald, four percent sapphire, three percent amethyst, one percent diamond, something like that. And then those are the classes of cards. You also know which wrestlers are available to open in that pack of cards, too. So you may want the diamond tier Roman Reigns, and you might get that 1%, but it might be a diamond tier CM Punk instead of Roman Reigns. So you could get a very good card and still feel like you lost. Or you might already have you might already have that one, and it converts that card just into the standard points, which you can't really do very much with standard points, because standard points do not convert into the points you use to buy packs, because the best way to get those points is to spend dollars on your credit card.

SPEAKER_02 30:44

Of course.

SPEAKER_00 30:46

Yeah, so it's a loot box system, and this is probably the mode that is the backbone of the financial life of the game. Probably a lot of games tend to do that. Yeah, you get the sale of the game now, which there's four versions of 2K26 for WWE that are gonna come out. There's the standard, the deluxe, and then collector's edition, and then the super collector's edition. And I think the super collector's edition is like$120. So you buy that, and you do get a bunch of points to buy those packs with. So it's like you're buying the game plus your first several sets of loot boxes, plus the season pass, so you're gonna get all the DLC wrestlers unlocked automatically. So it's not a bad deal. You just have to really be sure that you want to invest in the game. Right. Now that's one example of gambling in a video game, and again, I really do enjoy playing that mode. You have to play the matches with the wrestlers that you unlock in your packs, and that's a fun thing to do. But the very first time where a video game forced me to gamble, I was trying to collect all the trophies for the platinum trophy in Final Fantasy 13-2. And there was a trophy that was about winning a certain number of Gill. Gil is the currency in all Final Fantasy games, and you had to win, I think, two million gill at the casino, and there were only two different games you could play. There was a slot machine and there was chocobo racing. And I decided that chocobo racing was not lucrative enough for me to get to the two million gill in a reasonable amount of time. So I went to the slot machine and I got a rubber band. I looped it around my controller so that it was pressing down the X button on my PlayStation 3 controller, and then I just let the slot machine auto-activate as quick as possible for hours and hours one night. I even left to go pick up my wife from work and bring her back, which was about a 90-minute to two-hour ordeal on nights where she worked because it was like 45 minutes each direction. I came back and I still had not earned two million gill until about an hour and a half after I got back from picking her up. So it literally took seven hours of playing that slot machine to earn the gill that way. But that's how I played. I did not play, I just rigged the controller so that I would get the trophy eventually. Yeah, you did a manual macro. Yep. Yeah. That trophy is not a measure of my skill at the game. And that's part of why I don't like gambling games myself, is when I succeed, I want to feel like I succeeded. I don't like things where chance, luck, fate, or my destiny decided to give me something at random. I was raised to believe that the world is a meritocracy and I'm expected to be the chosen one. And that is not always healthy, okay? But that is why the gamer's journey exists. Which did you know I wrote a book? Did you know it won an award? Gamer's Journey. You wrote a book? All right, we gotta fit that into every episode.

SPEAKER_01 34:38

We have to point at least more than once.

Side Hustles, Wages, And Risk

SPEAKER_00 34:40

Since the book is out and I get to share those ideas with people, and there have been so many people buying the book recently. So thank you so much, everyone who is tuning into the podcast and has become a fan of these ideas by reading the book. I appreciate all of you. And if you're curious about this meme that comes up every episode of the book, you can go to drgamology.com and click the merch store and or just click the button where it shows the gamer's journey on the home page, and it'll take you to where you can buy it for me, and I'll send it to you the next day the post office is open. And uh anyway, the I appreciate everyone's support and even more than the support, I enjoy the enthusiasm for the ideas because I want video games to be helpful for people because the thing that shocks me in my career so much is that my ideas are surprising to people because for me, my whole life has been these ideas. It's that all the best strategies for doing a good job in school or memorizing my lines for a play, or like I was taking cues, strategizing, memorizing from video games. I learned how to memorize things because of Mortal Kombat and combos and fatalities and the need inside of me to just know how to do everyone's moves without looking at a book when I'm eight years old, like right. Video games have given me so much, and I just want people to recognize that in their own lives too. But the reason the gamers journey exists is because I had to justify my choices of how I decided to have fun almost my entire life. Why did you do that? Why are you playing these games so much? Why why do you why are you so fascinated with them? And so I was like on trial for my main source of fun all the time.

SPEAKER_01 36:42

Oh no, I grew up uh similar as you need to stop playing video games so much. No, I so I completely can get understand where that sentiment is coming from.

SPEAKER_00 36:58

Yeah. So when I was in high school, that's when Kingdom Hearts came out, and there have been other games before Kingdom Hearts that really activated this thought process, but I just really related to Sora and how he was not the most impressive kid on Destiny Island, because that would have been Riku if you're looking at combat ability or just cool factor. I was never the coolest kid, Doritos.

SPEAKER_01 37:26

But I have a hard time believing that.

SPEAKER_00 37:29

Oh, thank you. But I just really related to this idea that because of the situation, because the Keyblade chose you, you have to be the chosen one. And you have to do amazing things. And video games really taught me to believe that no matter what you ask me to do, I'll be able to figure out how to do it, at least in an academic sense, or I guess to a certain degree, I see myself that way in family stuff, relationship stuff. Being a dad, I I look at challenges in life like I have to accept them.

SPEAKER_01 38:08

So I had to look up the release date for the original Kingdom Hearts, and I was like, wow was it 2002? Yes, it was 2002.

SPEAKER_00 38:18

Yeah, all right.

SPEAKER_01 38:20

Yeah, I was already out of college by then, making appreciate the age check. That's okay. I don't it's all good. That's the great thing about games, though, is I think it's just a number in a game. And it's interesting that video gaming started with my parents' generation. They're both boomers. A couple of the first generation after that, we're getting close to retirement age, but there's still so many people that are out there playing games showing that it's not unhealthy. You still have a successful career, you can still do all these things and still play games, and just watching it change generation to generation and how it's not necessarily evolves, but how it has grown into its own thing now, instead of a recreational hobby. You have all the esports leagues and plenty of content creators out there getting doing solely game content that it's so much bigger than it ever was.

SPEAKER_00 39:28

Yeah, absolutely. And again, side hustles, right? And some people get lucky and they find a niche, they find their voice, they find a way to turn their personality into a product that people are willing to support, and that becomes their job. And it's this whole alternative approach to employment and what it means to earn a living. I'm always a fan of that. I don't I really was raised in that transition from high school into adulthood with that lesson. I know the lesson was very loud in the 80s, and that's the decade I was born. But you go to college, you get a real job, right?

SPEAKER_02 40:13

Oh, yeah.

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SPEAKER_00 40:14

And there are benefits of taking that challenge on yourself of academia. There's also downsides to that, too. I got to experience a lot of the benefits, but one of the major downsides is student loans. Unless your family has generational wealth, the choice to go to college means you might have a good job. It might pay you better than people that did not go to college, but you'll also have this massive monthly bill. And if you can't pay that monthly bill, then you have this big financial weight that like your net worth is never actually in the positive because no matter what you earn, you have this massive bill that you owe the government, right? And is that worth it? The it's borrowing to get an education, and there's also the phrase you have to spend money to make money. And I have learned professionally speaking in so many different ways in the last five years, that is totally true. If you are risk averse and you're afraid of spending money on your dream, just will not exist. So nope, that's a tough thing, too. But these are all things that push people to start imagining what their life would be like if you just multiplied what you have beyond what you can afford to have on your own. And I think that those thoughts lead to gambling. Video game gambling, though, has one really bad thing about it compared to casino gambling. Like a r it's a really awful decision, if you think about it. Because in in casino gambling or sports betting or whatever that is, the traditional games, you put your money into the pot with your idea, your decision, your button press, and what you get back if it's good, is money. With a loot box in SWOTOR or WWE 2K, you put your money into the pot to get the pack. What you get back is pixels on a screen. So no matter what you do, whether you win and you're successful and get the rarest item, you will not get value back. The value you get back is just psychological and emotional. It could lead to increasing your nostalgia and your enjoyment for the game, but it will not convert back into a real-world resource. That being said, people who succeed at the lottery or casino games or sports bets, they rarely keep that wealth and use it for anything other than to keep betting. And that is a strategic error because you get in your head and you start thinking that you're good at this, and then you it's hard to give up. You want to keep placing bets, and it's really unfulfilling to end on a loss, even in video games, without if you say this is the last poll, last poll magic or not. Right, last poll magic, that's mystical thinking. Like we're gonna do better on this one than we did all the other ones just because it's the last one and we're gonna be lucky that way. But if that last poll is worse by far than all the other polls of the night, that team probably is gonna do another last poll and say that one didn't count. And that's called chasing, actually. That's a gambling term. Chasing your losses, you can't stand the idea that you did so bad, and that's how you're gonna end. But then when you win, you keep playing too. So you gotta break the cycle. That's what this is all about. Is you don't want the way you play anything, whether it's a game that's fueled by your money or a game that's fueled by your time and your focus, you don't want it to take more from you than what you're giving and ruin areas of your life besides just dominating your source of entertainment.

SPEAKER_01 44:34

But and that is one of the things that, you know, over time, I don't know, I've had to learn how to do even like playing Baldur's Gate. Okay, I'm trying this, uh it's another TPK, okay. And I've set myself limits if I I have to look at the time because I have a habit of I won't sleep if I keep playing games because my mind keeps following the bunny and the side quests and the next thing. So I'll set a time limit, and it's okay. I get to this point, and that's one good thing about games like Baldur's Gate. You hit you can manually save, say, okay, save and shut it down. You're at a good spot, or even in the middle of combat, you can save and shut it down, walk away. But having that self-discipline to do it can be very hard because you want to finish it. Leaving things unresolved can be stressful unnecessarily.

SPEAKER_00 45:27

Yeah, that's really true. And also, sometimes our minds are afraid of finishing things, and so we'll leave things open-ended too, and that just creates a further loop of us saying stuck in the same cycle.

SPEAKER_01 45:44

That's called New Game Plus.

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SPEAKER_00 45:45

There are so many games, like I have not even done New Game Plus in Expedition 33 because I've not finished the DLC, and there's so many places on the map that I haven't gone. And I feel like it's better to leave the possibility when I boot that game up to go do those things than it is to just redo the story and have enemies that are juiced up more. At the end of the day, I guess what I really want is just to have the motivation to get back into that game and finish stuff. But for whatever reason, I haven't been doing that. Instead, I got into this whole Resident Evil 4 loop, and now I'm doing the arcade mode called Mercenaries, where you get a time limit and you have to run around.

SPEAKER_01 46:36

Yeah, you and Gene talking about that.

SPEAKER_00 46:38

Yeah, so I'm doing that. I actually got my first S on the village stage earlier tonight, and the goal right now is to get an S rank with at least one character on all four stages, because if I do that, then I get the best Magnum in the game, which is called the hand cannon. And and I do have the unlimited rocket launcher, but that feels so much like cheating. But with the hand cannon, you do kill things very fast, so you can play the highest difficulty, use the hand cannon. You at least have to aim and hit them with a bullet in order to take them out. The rocket launcher, you just aim in their general direction and hit yeah, you hit fire, and it's I hit the wall within 15 feet of them, so they're gonna stop running at me now. And bosses die in one hit. That's not a fulfilling feeling for me. I want to actually have to line up their vulnerable spots and hit them with a successful shot, but on those highest difficulties, if they can kill me in one hit, I want to be able to kill them in five, right? I don't want them to be able to kill me in one hit, and I have to kill them in 55 hits. That's not how I roll Doritos. I want the biggest, baddest weapon in the game that still gives me the feeling of I needed to technically succeed at this fight. The rocket launcher, there's no style for that. It's just like you get the cutscene for the boss, hold down L2, hit R2, and then you get the death animation for the boss. It's that was I want to play the game. I just don't want so until this to feel like Elden Ring. Yeah. Absolutely. So that's what I've been doing is I'm trying to get as many trophies in that game as I can. I'm getting better at aiming in that game and probably in other games too. The more games you aim in, the better you're gonna be at other games where you aim in them, is my theory that I'm testing right now.

SPEAKER_01 48:52

It's not wrong. I've played several games with the controller where you I've typically been horrible at aiming with a controller because I'm always been keyboard mouse. And yeah, it's definitely you get comfortable with how your controller works and the little okay, slight push here, slight pull there, turn and do this all the same, and you just learn how your devices interact, and it gets much more fluid.

SPEAKER_00 49:24

Yeah, that's very true. And this is the part of the episode where Marcus would hold up his best controller of all time, Xbox controller.

SPEAKER_01 49:35

It would if he had if it was here, his custom XI 33 controller with that.

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SPEAKER_00 49:42

Yeah, I am getting a lot more talented at aiming with the PlayStation controller. And as far as those pirate target zones that I did during one stream, I've actually gotten all achievements unlocked on two out of the six firing ranges. So for mercenaries, I'm one out of four, getting an S rank, and then for the target zones, I'm two out of six. So definitely making progress. I'm having a lot of fun with it. I'm playing not as much as I would if I was having an amazingly effective work-life balance, but I'm pulling off a lot of work stuff too. Maybe the goal for the remaining 10 months of 2026 will be to figure out what my life looks like if I do both of my jobs at very clearly structured periods of time in my day, and then I stop working at a certain point in the night. That would probably be really nice.

SPEAKER_02 50:51

It would be. What you do after that? You can continue to the journey.