When I started Lent and decided to give up video games, I told myself that it wouldn’t be so bad because I would have access to the gaming world via many other avenues. Blogs, online videos, podcasts - all of these things were about gaming, but not gaming themselves and thus all valid options.
This was not a good idea. Imagine someone who has been on a diet of rice and water for three weeks and gets seated down in the middle of a taco buffet. He can look at the tacos, smell the tacos, and watch other people enjoy the tacos, but he cannot have a taco himself. That sucks. And it was what I found myself up against.
I got very friendly with the “Mark All as Read” button in Google Reader. I watched the items build up over the course of the day and found myself surprised at the amount of articles that I was poring over on a regular basis. At first it was difficult to bypass all that news - “What if I was missing something really important?” When I realized the absurdity of that question I got along much better.
For full disclosure, I did fail once. A friend of mine invited me to visit his Minecraft server to see what had been recently built. Before I realized what I was doing I had logged in and was tromping around the world of Minecraft, admiring blocky castles and bamboo farms. It dawned on me after a few minutes that I had blown my goal and politely excused myself. I didn’t actually play the game, but I was logged in and looking around so I’d consider it a lapse nonetheless.
Otherwise, my Steam time has dropped to a healthy 0.9 hours in the past few weeks, and that brief time was using Chessmaster to analyze a game I had recently played online. I still watch the sale threads (I’ve managed to buy three games that I can’t play), but haven’t been keeping up on video game news. Somehow the world has kept turning.
This was not a good idea. Imagine someone who has been on a diet of rice and water for three weeks and gets seated down in the middle of a taco buffet. He can look at the tacos, smell the tacos, and watch other people enjoy the tacos, but he cannot have a taco himself. That sucks. And it was what I found myself up against.
I got very friendly with the “Mark All as Read” button in Google Reader. I watched the items build up over the course of the day and found myself surprised at the amount of articles that I was poring over on a regular basis. At first it was difficult to bypass all that news - “What if I was missing something really important?” When I realized the absurdity of that question I got along much better.
For full disclosure, I did fail once. A friend of mine invited me to visit his Minecraft server to see what had been recently built. Before I realized what I was doing I had logged in and was tromping around the world of Minecraft, admiring blocky castles and bamboo farms. It dawned on me after a few minutes that I had blown my goal and politely excused myself. I didn’t actually play the game, but I was logged in and looking around so I’d consider it a lapse nonetheless.
Otherwise, my Steam time has dropped to a healthy 0.9 hours in the past few weeks, and that brief time was using Chessmaster to analyze a game I had recently played online. I still watch the sale threads (I’ve managed to buy three games that I can’t play), but haven’t been keeping up on video game news. Somehow the world has kept turning.
Filling my time with non-gaming activities has proven to be... enjoyable. I’ve been more productive around the house. I’ve played more music and written more in the past few weeks than probably in all of 2010. I’ve read books. I used to be a voracious reader, but like many other hobbies my interest had dwindled.
Having said all that, I’m still looking forward to gaming again. I wasn’t looking for a reason to quit altogether, and I’m not about to say that anyone else should either. How much I’m missing it is a an eye-opener. I’ve thought about setting up some self-imposed restraints or time limits when I get back into gaming, but that seems like the type of attempt to change a certain behavior that usually fails. Instead maybe I’ll just try and keep the focus on all the other non-gaming activities that I’ve found myself enjoying these past couple of weeks.
1 comment:
An update! Awesome. I think you're definitely on the right track in terms of not self-imposing specific restraints on games when you're back to the usual swing of things.
Along those lines, I've had a really interesting shift in my attitude toward eating meat and it was practically overnight. It had nothing to do with me putting my foot down and saying "No more meat!"
Instead, I was just shifting my focus to finding my protein elsewhere and doing it for healthy, fulfilling reasons. Damn, now I have to record something. Great.
Anyways, point being that if the goal isn't "play less games" which is a taking away of sorts, but it's a more additive "play more music" then the games part sort of settles itself out naturally.
Post a Comment