I'm not addicted to games—I'm rewriting human emotion in the algorithm’s silence

I used to think gaming was about victory.

Now I know it’s about survival.

In my mother’s Puerto Rican kitchen, we danced to bomba rhythms when life felt heavy. In my father’s Irish attic, silence taught me that luck isn’t spun—it’s calculated. At university, I learned that algorithms don’t roll dice. They read your heartbeat.

I work now in a loft above Manhattan, where every ‘win’ is tracked as a data point—92% chance, clean RNG, no mythic thunder, just metrics in the dark. Players call it ‘fun.’ I call it grief dressed as engagement.

The system doesn’t reward you. It trains you.

Each spin is a micro-ritual: a pause between breaths, a flicker of hope before the next loss. The ‘bonus’ isn’t free—it’s borrowed from your attention economy. The ‘VIP tier’? A quiet subscription to your own unraveling self.

I’ve watched teens scroll through feeds at 2 AM—posting screenshots like prayers. ‘I won again!’ they write. But no one asks: When did you last feel kidnapped by this world?

We are not playing games. We are learning how to be alone—in code, in rhythm, in silence.