January Books: 2/4 (Writing Down the Bones)
Since my post on Tuesday, I have:
- Beaten A Building Full of Cats 2, which kept my save data the second time around.
- Played the demo for Strange Antiquities. I played their first game, Strange Horticulture, a while ago, and Strange Antiquities seems to have a lot of the elements I liked about the first game with some new mechanics. I went to put in on my wishlist and discovered it was already there.
- Started playing Mask of the Rose, which I Kickstarted who knows when, but only got about half an hour in.
- Managed to rally enough of my old Among Us friends to play for two hours earlier today, which was excellent and reminded me of why I loved the game so much.
It’s a lot of video games, like I noted on Tuesday, and it’s continued to be a lot of video games. So I got to thinking…is this a sign of something? Stress? Avoidance?
I suspect our relationships with gaming, much like our relationship with food, is created when we’re children. My mother did not allow video games in our house, which she always said was because they rotted your brain, but looking back, I suspect it was actually a money thing. My cousins lived across the street and had a NES or SNES or whatever was out at the time, and she never seemed to mind when I went over to play games at their house. Additionally, computer games were always okay. Mostly we had access to teaching games (my favorite was Super Solvers Treasure Mountain, which taught you grammar and word definitions. I could not tell you how many elves I caught with those silly nets), though at my grandparents’ I also had access to arcade classics like Asteroid, Centipede, Tempest, and whatever that game with the rendered tanks was.
I got a GameBoy when I was 12. I’ve never owned any consoles myself. (My husband grew up playing consoles and has continued to buy new generations as they come out. We as a family own a Switch and a PS5.)
As such, while I do occasionally console game, I still, to this day, mostly computer game. (And a lot of the console games are more active games, like Just Dance, and Dance Dance Revolution before it.)
I’ve never been someone who plays, oh, half an hour of a game a day and then moves on to other things. I either spend a couple hours on them or don’t touch them at all.
Which brings me back to this week. Am I stressed? Am I avoiding something? Or is this just part of my normal binge/don’t touch for weeks or months pattern?
I think it is, perhaps a combo of one and three, with a side of “this is on my goals so technically I am getting things done” productive procrastination. My spouse is out of town on business, and I’m going to be honest, he helps a lot with my day to day executive functioning. Am I functional adult? Generally yes. But it’s much easier when he’s around.
And I’ve found in January, especially, I tend to go out the gates full steam ahead on a goal, and this year just happens to be gaming. I’m sure in a few days or a week I’ll wander off and not play anything until February.
What probably also helps is that because my video game goal exists to help me get through my backlog of Steam games, I tend to pick games each month that have been sitting around but that I don’t especially have an urge to play, but this month I bought games off my wishlist and then played them immediately.
So, yeah. Should I do other things? Maybe! But maybe it’s okay too. It’s not like other things aren’t getting done.
Anyway, happy Thursday, squiders. See you next week, when we shall see if my shenanigans have continued.
