Last night was probably the best Halloween ever. After work, I went home expecting to have to hand out free candy to a bunch of brats that didn’t deserve it. I heard the first doorbell ring of the night, and my wife was on the phone. She quickly told me that she didn’t buy any candy, so I should use some of our personal stash to give to them. I shook my head, No way, so she just said, “Just ignore the door then, turn off the lights, and turn down the volume on the TV, so the kids don’t think we’re home.”

When I received the green light to use the red light, I was pumped. I quickly ran and locked our door, turned off our lights, closed the blinds, and turned down the TV to display to the world that we weren’t a welcome mat for free candy. For the next hour or so, the leeches rang the doorbell, and knocked on the door, but we hid out in our hideout, and pretended that we weren’t home. It was glorious. After a while our reputation for not being home spread, and the doorbell stopped ringing.

The screams of sadness from the kids, lulled me comfortably to sleep on the couch. Dreams of sugarplums, not handed out to kids, danced in my head. When I woke up an hour or so later, it was dark. All the neighborhood kids were now in the custody of their own parents, properly over sugared and the problem of their own instead of me. My hope was that their were shrieking at their parents, because they wanted to stay up counting their candy. Parents can hate, but isn’t shrieking what Halloween is all about?

I wish I could credit the gloriousness of the neighborhood kids not penetrating our fortress of solitude on Halloween on pure luck. But in my post-Halloween nap realization, I can pinpoint the bitterly good night on a culmination of years of unwittingly practicing video game hooks.

Here’s what I mean:

Video games are compelling and addicting for a lot of reasons. The biggest reason is that developers install hooks into games that keep players playing. Authors, marketers and TV writers all use them, but video games are probably the best at using them. It’s the reason why games make so much money, and some people can’t stop playing them.

One of the biggest hooks is progression. When you start out in a game, you’re just a regular shlub, a weakling, a worthless pile of clay. But then games give you a little taste of power and they get you hooked. In Legend of Zelda, you’re just a sad little Link with a Tunic and nothing else to survive the lands beasts. In MegaMan, you’re a robot with a little pea shooter. In Super Mario Bros., you start as a tiny little Mario that is the same height as your first enemies. In Zelda, an old man in a cave gives you a sword, which gives you power to slay some beasts. In Megaman, when you beat the first boss, you obtain their weapon along with your little pea shooter. In Mario, in the first level, you get a mushroom that gives you height, a flower that gives you fireballs, and a star that gives you invulnerability for 20 seconds. After being given so much power, you can’t help but keep playing so you can discover more new powers.

Another big hook is scarcity and rarity. At the beginning of many games, the game developers like to show you a powerful weapon, Pokemon, or impenetrable fortress right as a tease for how cool of a weapon, or Pokemon or huge fortress you can take down. They like to show you a rare thing that you have to have, but only after playing for hours and hours. In Pokemon, they like to show you the super-rare one-of-a-kind Pokemon right at the beginning, so you will play 60 hours to get it.

Another hook similar to the rarity hook is the Massive Open World hook. In other words, everything you can see is a place you can go. In Zelda Breath of the Wild, Link wakes from a hundred-year slumber and starts the game at the top of a mountain with a view of the massive, expansive world that he can explore. There is for sure secret doors, caves, castles, new friends and new enemies you will want to explore. This example itself makes me want to play just so I can figure out how one obtains a 100-years slumber like Link. My whole goal is to be able to sleep more than 20 minutes without being interrupted, let alone get a 100 year nap.

How do these hooks apply to Halloween? Since I don’t want people near me, I unknowingly executed an 8-year plan of anti-hooks.

When we first moved in, kids came to our house, and we were generous with our candy, even giving out King Sized candy bars one year. The next year, we didn’t give them King Sized bars, but they kept coming. Another year, kids were came to our house almost daily and told their friends to come, so we were giving out candy almost all year.

It was then that we started our plan of regression. Through that year, we answered the door, but less and more randomly. We turned them into little Pavlov’s dogs, because they thought ringing doorbell = candy. We kept confusing them, by being more sporadic and random. Suddenly, ringing the doorbell didn’t always = candy. The final hammer was last year, when we decided to not be home during the biggest and most expected door answering day of the year, Halloween. They ALL expected us to be home. But we pulled the welcome mat out from under them and completely destroyed their expectations of candy at our house. It was glorious. This year, with only enough effort to power through the first 5 or so bells, we became the place that wasn’t going to give candy.

My wife and I had discussed using the anti-scarcity or rarity hook, by giving them common things we had in the house like chicken from Chick-Fil-A, but we might save that one for another year, because that would be a multi-year reputational thing. When we do that, we plan on becoming part of the Local Legendary Halloween lore, that goes national and mainstream like the razorblades in apple and dentists handing out toothbrushes instead of candy. We want them to avoid our house like the plague or a haunted house with trapdoors and spiderwebs with real spiders. If we gave them chicken and told them to heat it before the eat it, parents from all around the world would tell them to avoid the Bitter House.

We can learn a thing or two about hooks and anti-hooks from video games. If we can hook people into playing millions of hours on games, we can certainly use anti-hooks to get people to avoid us forever. There is just one more hook that I will use for this post and that is the Bitter Friday Giftures you like to use to avoid reading the post…

I came home last night…

Unfortunately…

I felt really bad…

We had to endure a few…

But the shrieks…

Soon became…

They went away after a while…

When I woke up, I realized without thinking…

I have years of video game playing hooks…

I used the progression technique…

I also used the scarcity of items…

To turn the kids…

ARRRGGGGHHHHHH

Bitter Game Hooks Ben