Tears of the Kingdom is saving me from my checklist obsession

polygon.com:

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, like its predecessor Breath of the Wild, is an enormous game packed with an unbelievable amount of stuff to do. It ought to be overwhelming — but in a twist, it’s actually helping me break one of my most compulsive habits.

I’m busy. Not abnormally so — not any more than you are, probably — but life just fills up, you know? I’ve got a to-do list for work and a to-do list for everything that’s not work. I’ve got precious little time for myself and a million things I want to do with it; I’ve got ballooning lists of things to watch and read and play that I’ll never keep up with. I’ve got apps for logging movies and TV and games and books. I feel compelled to optimize. I’m min-maxing my free time.

Some of these habits are bred by gaming. Think of the sprawling open-world games that parcel out their huge maps and epic narratives in a digestible structure of objectives, checklists, and collectibles. (My friend calls them “UbiJobs,” after the framework of latter Assassin’s Creed games.) My beloved World of Warcraftis basically an infinite to-do list in video game form. It can feel like work, but it’s also satisfying, and it gives you a sense of achievement and mastery — so you try it in life. The designers of gamified apps for micromanaging everything from pocket money to movie-watching certainly learned from this school of design, too.

With me, the habit of turning everything into a checklist has started consuming games that don’t outwardly encourage it. Until recently, the big game in my life was Octopath Traveler 2, a classical RPG with eight parallel storylines that’s light on sub-objectives and tracking systems, and that leaves the player a lot of freedom in how to approach it,