Marvel Snap is the most positive addiction I’ve ever had

I don’t look cool. I have aged ungracefully. At 18 I was Morten Harket meets the Milky Bar Kid. Now I am Gary Oldman’s Dracula meets a potato. Yet I bonded with the coolest guy in my town this week. He and his mates invaded the bus en masse, all tumbling hair, skinny jeans and laughing eyes, fanning out around me, thinking it best not to bother the hobo in the ski jacket and ankle wellies.

I caught sight of the screen on Cool Guy’s phone. My heart flipped and I said the words that have united a million people around the world recently.

“That Shuri nerf, eh? Wow!”

He looked at me and nodded. In a single moment I had leapt across the valley of unhipness and was part of his cool gang. We didn’t do anything silly like smile or fist bump, but we connected. Because we are part of the Marvel Snap community.

Games communities are ace. As single-digit whippersnappers we would crowd round Pac-Man and Defender, gleefully slapping unwanted advice and even less welcome incursions on each other’s smart-bomb buttons. We would swap tips at school on the best routes for Pac-Man and talk in reverent tones about the first person we saw play right through the LaserDisc coin-swallower that was Dragon’s Lair.

Then I was part of the Spectrum Gang, who looked askance at those with Commodore 64s in the same way the Tiswas tribe looked at Swap Shoppers.

I never got into the factionalism of Sega v Nintendo because, as the host of GamesMaster, it wouldn’t have been politic for me to pick one side. It would have been like admitting which of the Glasgow football teams you supported. Been there. Done that. Got the skidmarks to prove it.

But I was part of the Sensible Soccer community. And the Championship Manager one. That produced glorious in-person tournaments and real Sunday league football teams. Then that thing called the internet came along and gaming communities bloomed internationally. And that was what made me part of the global FIFA community.

In the 18 months since I left FIFA and its community behind, it’s the one thing I have missed. Not the game itself, with its dabbing celebration hellscape and instant-message toxicity. I have played oodles of games I wouldn’t have touched if I was still enslaved to FIFA Ultimate Team. Today my life – gaming and otherwise – is richer as a result. But I miss being part of something huge and constantly evolving.

That’s what Marvel Snap gives me. Initially it was merely my fun, comic-fanboy gateway to card-deck games. Then I started seeking out websites, forums and feeds swapping tactics. I enjoy them as much as playing the game. My day now runs on Marvel Snap time. I get into work at some vague point in the day, I can make a guess at what time school starts for my kids, but I don’t even have to look at my watch to know it’s time for the thrice daily mission updates and new card issues. I feel it in my water, which, at my age, empties at far more regular intervals.

I’m probably addicted to Marvel Snap. But the most alluring part of addiction (for me anyway) is that it gives you a framework and timetable. The older we get the more we look for something to run our lives for us. To make decisions and return to those childhood years where we were safe and looked after. Because making decisions is exhausting and we blame ourselves when we get them wrong. Much better to blame FIFA, or cocaine.

But Marvel Snap is one of the more positive addictions I’ve had, because it is a game with joy at its centre. Joy in the gameplay, the animation, sound effects and card variants. Joy in the fact that the only way you can communicate with an opponent is through a small bank of public, onscreen, inoffensive pictures and words. The game designer Ben Brode is the most insanely joyful chap. His regular videos are full of infectious smiling enthusiasm. The April season features cartoon variations on the Marvel animal characters, with pride of place going to Jeff the Baby Land Shark.

The game constantly evolves to keep it joyful. Not just with new card content but buffs and nerfs (as the kids say) to old ones. Online gameplaying happiness desiccates when one style of play dominates (“The Meta” – The Kids). The Marvel Snap gatekeepers never let these dominate for too long. That comforts a rubbish player like me. I never thought comfort and joy would be the two things I looked for in games, but they are a counterpoint to the frequent misery of existence, and comfort is fleeting in a world that is terrifyingly impermanent.

Maybe it’s because I am at the age where parents (and contemporaries) are getting sick and dying, but I am this close to writing the great French existentialist gaming novel where a man finds his only real joy in Super Mario Kart. But not today. Today, I am only 2,300 tokens away from the 6,000 I need to buy Jeff the Shark. So, it’s clobberin’ time!