The New Attention Economy

On deep engagement, Elden Ring, and Substack

The 2022 role-playing game Elden Ring came out in February. By October 2022, the game had sold 17.5 million copies. It’s a contender for almost every “Game of the Year” award. Elon Musk himself nominated it as his choice, despite some questions about his choices.

A product of mythical game creator Hidetaka Miyazaki and mythical fantasy author George R.R. Martin, Elden Ring signified a new possibility in the attention economy: depth over delirium. This is a big deal, considering digital attention shares the same vanishing caloric density of a Cheeto and, amid a buffet of novelty, we starve in the unending search for what’s truly worth our attention. We “pay” attention to what matters, but, as digital consumers, we’re pretty stingy: on average, consumers spend 54 seconds on websites and use an average of 10 apps during the 4-6 hours we spend on our phones every day. We are constantly everywhere and nowhere all at once. Proust would have been horrified. After all, he believed pleasure was only obtainable in reflection on an experience, writing in Remembrance of Lost Time (a wonderful thesis on life, including regret and focus):

“Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.”

-Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Lost Time

Maybe we enjoy this interminable search for satiation. The proof is undeniable: the average Tik-Tok user spends 1.5 hours on the app and opens it eight times each day. Instagram users spend 53 minutes every day scrolling, tapping, and watching. But how can we remember any of these digital experiences when it takes almost a half hour to regain our focus when we’re interrupted? Think about your day yesterday. What did you learn online? What did you see? What social media content can you name from last week? What can you remember from today, after an hour of scrolling?

In the attention economy, remembrance is secondary to engagement. This has given way to a design philosophy that prioritizes number of engagements over meaningful engagement. That’s why it’s exciting to see Elden Ring and Substack present a design philosophy based not on delivering the newest experience as quickly as possible but on what we become when we truly focus on one thing. Unbroken attention, perhaps, is becoming valuable in the new attention economy.

The Game within the Game

It’s taken for granted that attention requires endless engagement. To maintain endless engagement, developers gamify every digital experience. Gamification is defined as:

The strategic attempt to enhance systems, services, organizations, and activities by creating similar experiences to those experienced when playing games in order to motivate and engage users.

The goal of gamification is to increase the value of each session a user spends with the experience, whether it’s a mobile app, a corporate tech product, or a social network, and often manifests in the colorful bleating of rewards and siren-red notifications telling us to check out an update.

Gamification works, because we get an addictive rush when we accomplish something, even virtually, in a warm flood of endorphins some therapists claim is equivalent to snorting a line of cocaine.

This model works when these experiences are novel. Now that every digital experience attempts gamification in some form, we are becoming numb to it. We see this most clearly with digital ads. Most web viewers have long ago become blind to ads, according to a study from Nielsen.

Source: Nielsen

If digital ads, which are so indiscernibly different than our social media presences, are forgotten so quickly, what chance do our posts have of making any impact at all, of representing our values, our ambitions, our connections, and our personalities in any way that isn’t forgotten as quickly as they are consumed?

In-game gamification for video games started at scale with World of Warcraft (2004), which at one point had 100 million active accounts and made more than $9 billion in revenue in 2017. Optimizing player pleasure at an industrial scale, developers decided gamers don’t want to explore and discover, they want to accomplish and achieve. Virtually and physically, we all, apparently, love the grind.

Attention is sustenance: Getting players to buy and keep coming back and monetizing those sessions is critical. Video games, like social media and websites and mobile apps, are now an infinite staircase in which the climb is guided by notifications that blink in UFO patterns with alien demands. The experience is not the product, but the climb toward the unreachable light.

The gamer’s pathological obsession with “optimization” ensures the efficiency of as many narcotic accomplishments as possible. This gives way to military-grade mods and add-ons that reduce the risk of sub-optimal movement - and attention paid to what doesn’t matter in the micro-moment - to a minimum.

Most modern games come with these kinds of things by default. The race to engage players by streamlining every experience is existential: there are 9,500+ games on available for download on Steam. Legendary RPGs that take 200+ hours are available for download in five minutes at a price point cheaper than most beers.

Even masterful games like The Witcher III notify, overexplain, and measure to hook the fickle fish that are today’s gamers. It can feel sometimes like you’re reading a grocery list when figuring out what to do next.

One of the most brazen cases of the clown-like prostrations for attention is found in The Elder Scrolls Online, a terrific and beautiful game that I had to quit when just logging into the game felt like I was visiting a webpage full of never-ending pop-ups, or checking an email inbox.

This is the modern attention economy: The users stay engaged, but, the engagement is not founded on a relationship to the product but on a relationship to the notifications themselves, a connection built on an infrastructure with the fortitude of a sand castle during high tide. This is why the startlingly blank user interface concepts of Substack and Elden Ring give me hope.

The Power of a Blank Slate

Elden Ring flings players into a world that explains nothing. If you choose the class of “Prisoner,” you start in baggy underwear that flaps as you run. The world, which is explosively original, carves itself into your memory because, simply, you haven’t seen anything like it before or even copies or pale imitations of anything like it. In this setting, free from any guidance or context all, players form the experience around their individual interpretation without packaging and without filters. The minimal, almost non-existent UI keeps the experience front and center, unburdened with someone else’s agenda for your revelations.

In Elden Ring, self-discovery is power, not the speed in which you follow dotted lines to the next ordained objective. This takes deep engagement and sustained focus. In this attention economy, attention pays off when you lose yourself in the product itself, not the notifications.

With 13.4 million copies sold in a single month, the dismissal of modern game mechanics and the modern attention economy that fuels the machine, Elden Ring is a referendum on an attention economy addicted to the meaningless minutes of monotonous engagements.

Reading or writing in Substack, which offers users nothing but words, gives me the same feeling: it makes me remember what it is to actually get lost in an experience, rather than the canyons of ads, hive of recommended content, and the slot machines dinging from the margins. In writing and in reading Substack, there is no other shiny new pellet of purpose glinting like a bullet from a crowded screen. People actually read long things on Substack. They leave thoughtful and unhateful comments and earnestly engage. They stick around and even come back. If they like your stuff, they subscribe and give you a direct connection through email.

Are we entering an age where depth, not distraction, is the new novelty? Elden Ring and Substack are examples of a new attention economy where products are built in the assumption that users want to engage on their terms instead of by the terms of an algorithm or a constant stinging notification to achieve something new, or else. In Elden Ring and Substack, we can see that people engage deeper when they’re not forced on the treadmill of mechanically manufactured incentives - and that deep engagement leads to higher revenue and higher loyalty.

Like Elden Ring, Substack succeeds with seamlessness, offering creators and consumers a digital experience with the functionality of a flow state where the technical is invisible to the tangible. How else could you explain the fact that Substack is one of the rare websites where paragraphs longer than three sentences don’t feel like dust in the eyes? Thoughts and meaning and the value of our own experiences last longer in the new attention economy. Or did I lose you already?