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Attention
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5 min read

Let me level-up about playing games on my phone

Like all art, there's no standard for 'good', but good art doesn’t leave you puzzling over how you wasted an hour.

Mark is a research mathematician who writes on ethics, human identity and the nature of intelligence.

A gamer plays on a phone.
Onur Binay on Unsplash.

Earlier this year I got a bit too into a mobile phone game. In the game, I was master and controller of a small virtual grid of assorted shiny objects. By the flick of my finger on the screen, I’d swap the objects to try to match groups together. If I did this in the right way, then the matching objects would merge into shinier ones which would help me win the game. I’d want to know what the next shiny thing would be and how I could use it to beat the next level. 

I first started playing on my commute to work – usually I like to read or write and listen to music and sometimes to catch up on emails – but on that day I felt too tired for any of that. The puzzles started easy but got gradually harder. They were challenging enough to occupy the mind, but never felt too taxing, and the satisfaction-hit from each small win along with the visuals and sound-effects made me really want to keep playing. On the train home, it felt easier to just open the app and play a few levels than do anything else. I’d start the journey by telling myself I’d do a few levels and would do something else, but I’d easily spend the best part of the journey rearranging shiny objects. 

I knew this wasn’t ideal. I’ve come to see my commutes as a rare unfilled moment, each a scrap of time, a space to read and think, and I was filling this gift with a pixellated dopamine hit. I’d try to stop and bargain with myself – setting a limit of say five levels per journey, but knowing this to be an arbitrary number, I’d blow straight through it. There are other empty moments, waiting for the bath to run or once the children are in bed, but these other scraps are empty only in appearance, and I started to play in these too. 

My phone has a ‘sleep mode’ which tries to mitigate the by now well-documented negative effects of phone use on sleeping – lower sleep quality, duration and interference with circadian rhythms. In sleep mode, you choose a time – after this the colours of your phone will be replaced by black and grey. I started using this feature, thinking that at least if I dulled the bright colours to greys then I’d take the enjoyment out of playing and it’d be harder to tell the shiny squares apart. It was a good try, but it didn’t work. I learnt to tell the grey objects apart, and played on. 

Mainly, what I'm not doing when I’m glued to my phone is engaging with life.

You’ve heard it before, but our devices are not that good for us – excessive smartphone use fuels depression, anxiety and insomnia, and the average teenager spends seven to eight hours a day in front of a screen. Smartphones are closely related to social media - a recent study found one in six adolescent girls showed signs of social media addiction. Smartphone use has become a well-worn topic with a familiar set of talking points: How lucky we are to have all the world’s knowledge in our pocket; how bad we should all feel about being so distracted; how smug we can feel about the fools stuck to their phones. These discussion points aren't new - many of the concerns about smartphones and screen-time started decades earlier in response to TV and video games. 

These concerns are certainly valid, but I find it easier to consider what some of my smartphone habits are stopping me from doing. I'm not sure I'd advocate that we all stop using smartphones - having easy access to the Internet is a huge convenience, but I do pause to think about what I'm not spending time doing when I obsessively scroll or click. I'm also not convinced that all mobile games or even all social media use is bad. Computer games can be entertaining and thought provoking. Like all art, there's no globally agreed standard about what's good, but good art doesn’t leave you puzzling over how you wasted an hour. What differentiates social media and certain phone games is their business model – your time and attention is their revenue stream. 

Mainly, what I'm not doing when I’m glued to my phone is engaging with life. If I put the phone down, I could be more attentive to the people I'm with – be able to listen to all the subtle ways we tell each other how we are – in short, I could be more fully present. I could read books, and I could read whole magazine articles or news stories on my phone, actually stopping to read rather than scrolling from headline to headline. Or I could do nothing and just be, undisturbed. If I’m commuting, I could enjoy the scenery or just let my mind wander. And I can remember that even in the quietest moments I'm not alone - God is always alongside us, and we can always spend time and speak to Him in prayer. Even for a few short moments to lift up the joys and troubles of the day. 

“Well”, you may say, “That's all very nice hearing about these possibilities I could enjoy if I clawed back time from social media and freemium games. But how do I actually do it!?” Most of the answers I’ve found to this involve either stopping the habit completely – deleting the app or even not having a smartphone, or else they involve enforced periods away. Some have found that a digital detox of several days or weeks has helped to reset their relationship with tech, others set fixed times in their day when they can and can’t use their devices or certain apps, and some observe a “digital sabbath” where they intentionally avoid or reduce technology use for a full day each week. 

As for me, my only way out was to delete the shiny object game, losing all record of all 1,500 completed levels. Given that I rejected my own help by outsmarting “night mode”, I doubt moderation would have helped. Unsettlingly, my fingers and part of mind really seemed to miss it. As I unlocked my phone, I’d feel a tinge of absence, as though checking my emails or messages didn’t have the same grip as matching colourful blocks 

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Interview
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Loneliness
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5 min read

Why we need friendship more than romance

Friendship Lab's founder opens up on opening up.

Jack is a graduate of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge and Blackfriars, University of Oxford. He writes, and also works in local government.

A speaker, standing in front of a screen, beckons with one hand, holding a mic with the other.
Voysey at the Lab launch.

Henri Nouwen, the Dutch Catholic priest, professor, writer, and theologian, wrote in Reaching Out of an encounter with one of his students who entered his room with the disarming remark:  

“I simply want to celebrate some time with you.” 

Recently, I had the great pleasure of celebrating some time with Sheridan Voysey, the founder of Friendship Lab, which is the first non-profit organisation dedicated to enabling adults to reach out and making friendship thrive.  

Sheridan, an Australian by birth, describes himself as a ‘writer, speaker, and broadcaster with ‘a keen interest in what makes life deeply worthwhile’. Beyond that, he goes on, “I am a husband to Merryn” and “big dog” to a cockapoo called Rupert, and he makes Oxford his home.  

He and I met in the Liddon Room of Pusey House, one of the chaplaincies to the University of Oxford, which is where I have made many of my adult friendships over the years. We had tea.  

We began our conversation by talking about solitude and silence. Sheridan told me that the Friendship Lab, which launched in London last month, had its genesis in a solo spiritual retreat he went on in 2019. He left thinking about friendlessness and wanting to write a book about adult friendship. The pandemic played into this, creating an opportunity for Sheridan to broadcast about this issue when he was made Creative Lead of BBC Radio 2’s four-day Friendship Season in 2020. People pondered, when they were apart from one another, why it is that friendship is so difficult in the modern world. Sheridan led the way.  

“You’re thinking too small” were the words he heard on his second retreat at St Katherine’s House, Parmoor in 2021. He told me he was scared. Rather than writing a book, Sheridan resolved to rectify our world’s obsession with romance at the expenses of what he calls “its less glamorous sibling”. Friendship Lab, which provides courses and resources to build friendships that make life deeply worthwhile, was the result.  

Sheridan told me that he did not have many friends growing up in Brisbane, Australia. In the 1970s, he remembers, Brisbane was “a bit coarse, a bit rough”, and “to be an Australian male in Brisbane then was to be into beer, barbecues, football”, he said with a laugh. As a child, Sheridan stuck out. He was tall. “I was the kid who would be walking around the playground at lunchtime, constantly moving around to cover up the fact that I had no friends to sit with.” I asked him how this might have contributed to his thinking about friends as a fifty-year-old man.  

The answer was rooted in his childhood experiences—and his faith. His parents were Jehovah Witnesses when Sheridan was growing up, which he told me meant that his family were “absolute outsiders”. Then, his mum had “a wonderful encounter with God” in the late 1990s, where she came to believe that Jesus is the Son of God. It was, he said, “profoundly transformative” for the whole family. He had been “trying to find [his] life” “among the flashing lights and throbbing beats of Brisbane’s nightclubs” but felt “completely empty inside” until he made a commitment to Christ himself, aged 19. He told me that fostering friendship in others, matters to him because of his faith. “I have always had a heart for those on the periphery, and I want to bring them in.” 

Reaching out is connected to comfy silence in the company of others. 

Another factor which has shaped Sheridan’s sure-fire purpose to recover the lost art of friendship has been his marriage to Merryn. His book Resurrection Year recounts the decision he and his wife made in 2011 to move from Australia to Oxford, to recover from the death of a dream to have a child together. Merryn started out as a medical researcher within the University, soon earning a PhD through the college in the building where we met for our time together. Sheridan tells me, he had a “real identity crisis”. His own came through leaving a successful career broadcasting and speaking in Australia, which on top of the childlessness, gave rise to questions about his legacy. He also told me, it was “a great stimulus to think very deeply” about his friends. “How intentional am I being?” 

I can tell you, having spent one hour and a half with Sheridan, that he oozes intentionality in how he engages with others. This is why I was reminded of Henri Nouwen. The ‘twentieth-century Kierkegaard’, Nouwen was able to announce the arrival of another way to relate to others in the world. Reaching out is connected to comfy silence in the company of others, which Sheridan knows well. After some time in silence with Nouwen, his student said, ‘“From now on, wherever you go, or wherever I go, all the ground between us will be holy ground.”’ I might have said likewise to Sheridan as our time together drew to a close.    

Sheridan said,  

“I hope that Friendship Lab in its tiny little embryonic state will one day grow to the point where we can actually have some kind of cultural influence, and we can turn the tide.”  

I hope so too.  

Friendship Lab aspires to a world in which every adult has at least three ‘2am friends’, people who will help ‘at 2am when everything has gone wrong’. Sheridan Voysey is no longer thinking small.  

Like the Lord Jesus Christ, whom he believes to be the Son of God, Sheridan is looking unrelentingly at what makes life deeply worthwhile: love, and not just the romantic kind. Reaching out, this man is making friends.  

 

Find out more about Friendship Lab

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

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If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

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