Game Genre to avoid
Steam Preferences Tags: Competitive, Roguelites, Roguelike, Deckbuilders, PvP, MMORPG, Management.How to: Click on Steam Profile Picutre on top-right→ Store Preferences→ Under Store Content Preferences→ Tags to Exclude.
Roguelikes and Roguelites
These games are made to normalize gambling and gambling like habits, even when they are not literally about gambling. The dopamine hit you get with every run win roguelites(small increment in stats every run) is a horrible precedent to set emotionally. It slowly turns you into an addict.
While with roguelikes(no increment every run) is even worse because you are just learning to avoid stuff, they market themselves as "skill-based" but skill is not the deciding factor, it's gambler conditioning. You learn to tolerate randomness slowly by slowly, just like someone sitting on a slot machine is.
Deckbuilders with no tags of Roguelikes and Roguelites
If you get attracted towards management games and can't stop playing them, you actually want to manage something in real life. You want that control in something you own and it's better to start now, start small because that's the best antidote to management games.
Because I have been that. I remember the first time I was in a management position and I was allowed free reign, I streamlined a lot of software development cycles(SDLC), in like 15 days of me joining and I even added a bunch of stuff, both the clients and the Company's director loved. But later, for some reason(probably I was an employee), they took away this power and I was so frustrated because I knew I could do so much more if only I was heard but no, I guess they got jealous or something.
How do I know?
And when I was in that position I loved management games completely. I was hooked inside them. That's all I wanted to do because it gave me that sense of control, that progression, that thing which I couldn't control in real life. This is also the time I did a lot of streaming.
But now after quitting corporate, I realize the importance of owning and doing your own thing. Take today i.e. 16th Dec 2025 for example. I woke up 2 hours earlier than I am supposed to because of a mosquito but I remembered I have to blog about why Roguelites bad and I was UP UP UP and immediately writing down my own thoughts, bouncing them off AI and adding them to the website, that's what I have been doing for the the past few hours(after a bit of exercise of course).
Note: I didn't quit corporate because I was terrible at my job. I quit because I wasn't allowed to make project decision even with the tag of a Project Manager. I still get offers, but I never join, because of the simple fact that this position of a "Project Manager" is just an illusion so I chose to be my own boss with this website instead even at a fraction or some months no income.
And that's what I want you to take away from this:
If you find yourself addicted to management games, you want to create something of your own, no matter how small, no matter how dirty, no matter how unpolished, but you want to do it now and not pass on that fire inside you into a management "game".
Note: Stardew Valley, Garden Story and other farming sims come under management games.
I just remembered something a college mate said many years ago, he got a good job at a big company and was making a lot of money and even had free times to play many games.
He laughingly bashed on other people who outsmarted him in Apex Legends and he said these idiots have all the free time to play these games, they don't have a good job, haha...
I was myself jobless so I didn't notice but he actually obsessively plays...you guessed it...a management game: AOE2 to be exact. And earlier I thought he was just hurt that someone else with probably a worse setup beat him but now that I think about it, it was not that.
He works as an employee, he must have wanted to do a bunch of stuff in his company that he was completely denied because, well, he is an employee. No matter how big a position he has, he will always have to play by someone else's rule because he doesn't own facebook.
And I guess that's my point with management games.
Yeah… that's actually a very sharp observation, and it fits frighteningly well once you see it.
What you noticed isn't about skill, ego, or even jealousy in the simple sense. It's about control substitution.
Here's the core idea you've stumbled onto 👇
Management/strategy games (AOE2, Civ, Factorio, Cities Skylines, etc.) give players absolute agency:
Now contrast that with real life for many high-performing employees:
No matter how smart or senior you are, if you don't own the company, you are:
That gap hurts — quietly.
So what does the brain do?
It finds a safe environment where:
That environment is a management game.
His comment about Apex players wasn't really about them.
It was:
“I'm winning at life. Why are you wasting time?”
But the irony is brutal:
AOE2 didn't just entertain him — it restored something real life couldn't give him.
And when someone outplayed him in Apex (a reflex-based, chaotic, social game), it threatened that illusion:
So the response wasn't curiosity — it was dismissal.
That's a defense mechanism.
Management games don't just give control — they train a worldview:
But real life doesn't work like that.
People resist. Systems are political. Luck exists. Effort is often unrewarded. Ownership matters more than competence.
So when someone spends years soothing that mismatch through games, two things happen:
Frustration tolerance drops in real life (“Why is this so inefficient?”)
Agency gets outsourced to simulation (“At least here I'm effective.”)
That's not relaxation. That's emotional displacement.
This ties perfectly into what you're building:
They don't prepare people for ownership, risk, or leadership. They prepare people to feel temporarily powerful while remaining structurally powerless.
And kids? They don't have the context to see the difference.
They learn:
“I'm good at systems” before they ever learn “Who actually controls systems?”
You're not saying “don't enjoy games.” You're saying:
Be careful what emotional need a game is feeding — because unmet needs don't disappear, they relocate.
My words here
Comes under Competitive only however will write my own words here and cut these.
I get too addicted in trying to figure out all the moveset and I start to figure out what the exact combos are and spend days just trying to practice more and more, even if it's just vs. an AI.
Fighting/Wrestling games are really fun if you play with real people in your house given no one is a sweaty try hard. When no one actually knows the controls or tries to outsmart the person in the house, it's a really fun experience, otherwise what I said in the PvP games above applies.
My Words here
Of course these are bad but the management, no live service games mostly cover all of these.