I am in the zone again. I have been feeling a bit directionless lately, perhaps in the middle of an existential crisis. I was concerned that perhaps I needed to find direction in my life; to do something big and important. The people around me lately seem to be going out and getting jobs far away and making long terms goals their priority. I worried that perhaps I really needed to shake up my life to get back to the comfortable zone I generally reside in. It was a strange place to be and I did not like it at all.
I stopped worrying about that on Thursday morning. The thing that stopped me worrying was Wednesday night where I was up for an hour tossing and turning imagining things in my head. I was replaying Blood Bowl games from the previous day, obsessing over optimal player progression paths, and imagining an unstoppable team of dirty rats that would crush their enemies. My mind wouldn't stop spinning and fantasizing and calculating and .... it was awesome. I must play more Blood Bowl. I MUST BE BETTER!
I have always done that over one game or the other. For years it was WOW but I have been heartily addicted to so many games - SC2, SC1, Diablo2, Diablo3, Civilization, Plants vs. Zombies, HOMM3, and many more. It isn't good for me to be up all night twitching about my latest game but during the day it leaves me calm and feeling fantastic. That sense of flow, of intense absorption, is something I desperately crave. I need it, it would seem, and it seems to take the place of ambition in other folks.
For whatever reason I seem to need that obsession in my life. If my mind is totally occupied mastering a game I am happy and content and that is enough; other goals have no importance. It isn't like some people where they pick up a new game, bust through it in 30 hours and then put it away forever. Even games like Mass Effect 2 cause me to log a couple hundred hours. This is strange among gamers, I think, because when I hear people talk about games they have played so many different ones and none of them for thousands of hours. Moderation is for normal people; me, I am all or nothing!
Yeah, I don't get these gamers that tear through games either.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I recommend DROD. It's a nice little independent puzzle game with a dungeon crawl feel. It's completely deterministic so it becomes very engrossing as you start to understand how all the little parts come together in surprising ways. And it has thousands of hours of high quality user created DLC.