I turned 23 this week and, despite the lack of Taylor Swift songs to summarize my experiences, it’s been a good week. Of course, as Murphy’s law dictates, I had a midterm, on Wednesday evening, which cut my plans to have a pint with every meal short.

Surprisingly though, it was not my birthday that distracted me the most. It was a game called Agar. Here’s a link to it, if you wanted to wonder where a few hours of your life just went: http://agar.io/.

The premise of the game is that you are a dot, and you grow bigger by eating other dots, or other players. That’s it. Oh, and there is a leader board. Now, for the life of me I don’t know why I wanted to be on the top of that leader board so badly. That freaking leader board has been the bane of my existence.

I think it’s my ego that is to blame. You see, you can name your little blob. Be warned though, you can literally name it anything, so the game is a minefield of racial slurs, and inflammatory language. That’s another problem, I couldn’t play the game in public for fear that someone would just see me staring at a huge dot on the screen emblazoned with, “NAZI”; them not realizing my own smaller dot was locked in a life or death struggle to get away.

But I digress, I really just wanted to see my name at the top of that leader board. And the longer I played, and the closer I got, the more invested I became. So I retreated to my room and this festering sore of an obsession grew. Of course, I am exaggerating, creative license is a blessing, but I was like a meth addict, and the key to Walter White’s lab was sitting at the top spot.

Most ironic of all, when I eventually consumed the player, “Go Study,” (I’m not joking, that was their name), I took the top spot. And that was it. I just kind of looked around my room at 3 in the morning and decided I should probably go drink some water.

In terms of hours spent, versus pay off, it was kind of like someone in a wheel chair entering a raffle then winning a treadmill. Now that example is extreme but you get the point.

I could of course analyse the game’s dynamics, the greed of it, the need for caution and risk, the parallels with consumerism. But really, it was just a stupid game, and I didn’t really have that much fun playing it, but not every distraction has a purpose. Still though, I wish I could become obsessed with my history homework for once. So I guess if you felt that reading this was a waste of time then that’s a little fitting.