How Power Hours, 'Minit' And Vine Made Me Rethink My Precious Free Time
Power Hour is my favorite drinking game, and the other day I realized that that's really weird. I remember my first game of Power Hour about as well as one should remember their first go at a fun drinking game (fondly, but not too clearly). For those unfamiliar with it, Power Hour players take a shot of beer once every minute for an hour, usually marking the minutes by listening to an hour-long compilation of 60 song clips. My friends and I opted to just take sips instead of using shot glasses because we were doing it on a whim. All we did was find a decent looking Power Hour compilation on YouTube, grab a couple beers each and hit play. I drank a lot of Rainier. It was fun.
I respond to most time pressures in real life with a mixture of grumbling acceptance and procrastination (I swear I'm finishing my taxes soon). It seems that, on the flipside, I enjoy racing the clock in my leisure time. Those seemingly contradictory truths dawned on me sometime between picking a movie on Netflix that would end just before midnight (I went with "Wind River") and a session of playing the video game "Minit."
"Minit" is a new top-down adventure game published by Devolver Digital. It's a deceptively diminutive experience — at first glance, the monochromatic pixel art suggests a nostalgic sensibility, but the core game mechanic is refreshingly modern. From the moment you collect your trusty sword, the sword's curse is imposed: every 60 seconds, you die. On each death, you respawn at whatever house you visited last and any items or quest progress you've made is rolled forward. The clock never stops ticking, so every move you make has consequence. If you need the full 60 seconds to accomplish a task, running into a wall or missing a sword swing is enough to derail an attempt. Of course, little missteps aren't that big of a deal since you can just hit a button to die and start again.
The constant dying and resetting makes "Minit" a mix of old-school "Zelda" and "Edge of Tomorrow" on its surface, but the constantly ticking clock actually turns everything you do into something like a timed game of Concentration. If you're in the zone of playing "Minit," you're constantly building up a short term memory of what you've just done, what you need to do next and how to execute it. On your first playthrough, you'll rarely know exactly what your next move should be, but the game is so dense you'll never come up short for something you could try to accomplish with your next minute. Occasionally something you'll try will lead nowhere, but it never feels like the design of "Minit" is wasting your time. At the very least, the ever-present timer should remind you you're not wasting more than a few seconds.
As someone who is extremely online for their job, I'm really, really sensitive to feeling like I've frittered away my time. Whether or not you think the internet is ruining our attention spans, assuming that people have short attention spans isn't an excuse for making garbage. When I'm looking at articles and videos to circulate here on Digg, I'm constantly asking myself: is this respectful of the audience's time? Whether it's a blog post, a long read, a viral clip or a video essay, it's okay if my attention naturally starts to drift or if a pesky app notification pulls me out of the flow — but regardless of length, if the thing in question says nothing, it's a no-go.
Maybe that's why I like the time pressure of Power Hour and "Minit." Both experiences squeeze a lot into very little. A good Power Hour video picks 60 good songs themed by genre or era and it excerpts the very best bits of those songs. Really, the only way Power Hour is a "game" as opposed to "just listening to music and getting drunk" comes down to the clock, and with that alone it works well. My first blind playthrough of "Minit" took me a little over an hour, which would only feel short if I hadn't spent every second of it exploring a brilliantly designed world. I'm not trying to "optimize" my free time or "increase efficiency" here. I just don't like being left bored and wanting.
Perhaps my FOMO-esque nitpicking about wasted leisure time is just a result of me grappling with the loss of Vine, the last hub of our culture that was guaranteed to respect your attention. The perfect 6-second video basically represents the polar opposite of everything bad online; of lame text-centric slideshows born of pivots-to-video; of click-hungry opinion pieces by trolls; of aimless Snapchat and Instagram stories; of over-long Netflix original series. A good Vine doesn't waste your time, and neither do good Vine compilations… which might explain why I watch a few every week.
I'm not trying to arrive at some grand thesis about myself or about the circumstances of modern life that might condition people to treat their off-the-clock time as vanishing resource. All I want is to better understand my own habits in the hopes that, with a better grasp of my likes and dislikes, I'll be able to think more clearly and relax more fully. If a ticking clock helps with that, so be it.
Anyway, I think I'm gonna try to combine Power Hour rules with "Minit" soon. Maybe I'll try to race the game against a Vine compilation too. If I reach a zen-like state of bliss, I'll let the world know as soon as I get back to work.
