I created a backend for a mobile game once. It was one of those typical mobile "get hooked" clones, with loot boxes, hard & soft currencies, the works. It was created to promote a sports club, one of the really big ones. I was mainly just programming other people's ideas (if I wanted to write a game it certainly wouldn't be something like that), but they needed help parameterizing loot chances and stuff like that, and I eagerly helped - I wrote mathematical formulas that fitted their descriptions & presented it to them and it was quite fun as opposed to the usual business software "data goes from A to B" boring crap.<p>At a certain point we had a tournament. The prize was surprisingly rich, the club gave something quite rare and unique. So people really played! We would watch on those fancy Grafana charts I programmed how people would play night and day. I wrote an SQL query that would track the habits of the top 3 players specifically and we would comment on the few breaks in their gaming spree: "food", "power nap", "ahah, toilet break!". For an entire week. They slept an hour here and an hour there, otherwise they played. I sure hope the poor bastard who won really got their memorabilia.<p>The game stopped soon after that, the club decided to ditch it (for whatever reason, my employer said it was club politics but who knows). I was a bit surprised at myself that I didn't feel any really strong emotions about it.. I mean sure, the worst of it was when they were going for a real prize, but anyhow I never had a true "Oh no what have I done" moment, even before I learned the app would be cancelled. Not an emotional one anyway, rationally I do realize that entire mechanics and the tournament you could win by staking all your free time is not great to say the least.