5 min read · Mar 20, 2023
An iPhone game is trying to enlighten me and it’s succeeding.
I have never been one for iPhone games. Social media is my time-suck of choice, and until a few months ago I had not been tempted by the lure of a gaming app.
After seeing endless ads in my IG feed, I thought, wouldn’t it be hilarious if I downloaded Merge Mansion? This was before Pedro Pascal’s debut in their latest video ad, by the way.
The premise of the game is simple enough. You need to fix up a dilapidated mansion. You have a playing board where you merge items to create new ones, slowly unlocking more of the story.
There are item chests like a toolbox or a plant pot that spew out different items when you tap on them. Two wrenches become a mallet, two mallets become a paintbrush, and so on.
Despite my annoyingly slow progress in uncovering the game’s mystery, I’ve realized Merge Mansion is unintentionally teaching me something valuable.
Before I dive in, you need to know this about me. I am not good at delayed gratification. I am very much a “chocolate truffle now AND a chocolate truffle later” kind of woman. Curbing my impulses for instant gratification is one of the greater challenges of my adult life.
So, it’s not surprising that when Merge Mansion gave me a freebie piggy bank every day, I tap tap tapped that little piggy for all the money it would give me as quickly as I could.
It took me a while to realize that you can merge piggy banks to create even bigger piggy banks, all the way up to a monster golden piggy bank. To create that maximum-level piggy bank, you have to accumulate eight small piggy banks.
The game only gives you one piggy bank a day. So, that means you have to wait eight days to make maximum bank. Only eight days, you say? That’s nothing! I agree. Once I realized this was possible, I became a master of self-control.
Every day I dutifully save my little piggy banks. Every day I get to make a choice: small reward now, or big reward later? If I choose well, on that eighth day, I am RICH. It’s raining coins! It is SO satisfying. It’s like this for most things in the game. If you wait, you can merge items into more powerful ones that will advance you further and faster.
It started to make me think. The game presents me with such a simple concept. Be patient, resist the urge to cash in the piggy, and then reap big rewards. Rewards that would not have been possible if I had chosen instant gratification by tapping that little piggy bank.
In my life, I struggle to say no to sweet treats in the moment. I struggle to choose a morning gym session instead of an extra 45 minutes of sleep. I struggle to choose another hour of writing at my desk instead of an hour of TV. Why are those choices so hard, when I’m able to save my little piggy banks with relative ease? I realized I can apply some of the game’s tactics to my own real-life choices.
Eight days isn’t a long time to wait. The payoff isn’t immediate, but it comes pretty quickly. For the ongoing goals in my life, like my writing goals, the big payoffs aren’t going to come quickly.
This can be discouraging. What if I have to wait eight weeks, eight months, or even eight years for the big payoff? That makes it much harder to stay motivated.
In Merge Mansion, it might take you weeks to create maximum-level items. Thankfully, they have devised a great solution to keep you motivated — secondary rewards! In February, they started a side challenge that gave you roses for merging any items. You could then exchange those roses for powerups.
I started to give myself ‘roses’ for incremental achievements. I wrote my first 10 medium articles by promising myself a New York Yankees hat I really wanted once I reached the goal. And it worked! I’m going to keep rewarding myself for incremental goals to keep my motivation strong.
Saving piggy banks is easy because I KNOW a big payoff is coming on day eight. It’s guaranteed. I only properly understood this concept after reading James Clear’s page on delayed gratification. The massive piggy bank is a reliable experience, meaning I know with 100% certainty that something positive will come to me if I save the little piggy banks.
Take the example of my writing goals. The big payoffs aren’t guaranteed. I could write my butt off for years and it might not turn into a novel or a magazine column or a reliable freelance career.
But maybe I can pretend it will? Maybe I can choose to believe with all my heart that there’s a monster piggy bank waiting for me at the end if I just keep choosing a writing session over an hour of TikTok.
It’s the promise of a big reward at the end of the hard work that sustains me in my goals. But, unlike Merge Mansion, there’s no certainty in real life that the big reward is coming. I have to truly believe that putting in the work today will pay off tomorrow.
If I repeat to myself something like “writing regularly will land me a book deal” like a mantra, as if it’s a sure thing, maybe I can convince myself that writing is a reliable experience.
Maybe you’ll dismiss Merge Mansion as a stupid game that can’t teach you anything. I choose to see it as a simplified expression of what I am trying to practice in my everyday life.
I prioritized instant gratification too many times in the past, letting other things get in the way of my goal to write. I consistently chose TV, food, my phone, or whatever immediately satisfying activity that yielded immediate payoffs instead of doing what I KNEW I needed to do — sit down and write.
Finally, I feel some momentum around my writing. And I’m not expecting it to pay off any time soon. I just know that to be in with a chance of any payoff at all, I have to choose that future big reward over the immediate small reward every time.
