There just isn’t enough time for games these days.
I hop down to the surface of Alderaan, light up my
double-bladed saber and start showing bitches what for. But I can barely clear out one location
(roughly twenty to thirty minutes of work, really) before I look at the time
and realize, holy shit, I have to teach in seven hours. I glance wistfully at my class story quest,
bite my lip and press escape. I cycle
down to quit game. I’ll move the ball forward a little more tomorrow night, I silently
promise myself.
But this isn’t entirely true. I’m doing far more than I need to, reading a
little less than I probably should and writing with as much regularity as ever –
a little more than usual, actually, thanks to some inspiring words and moments
from cohorts and mentors and strangers alike.
Is it really my time that is growing less available, or the way I’m
arranging it?
Over the last week I’ve become incredibly ill, spent about
three full days just looking at apartments with a young man who cannot find the
apartments he wants to show me, put down a deposit on a fresh apartment and
begun assembling the materials to secure said apartment while fighting off the
previously mentioned illness. And when I
think about all this time I’ve been spending being some sort of “adult,” I’m
not sure that gaming is actually what I’m sacrificing to do it. I think what I’m really sacrificing, most of
the time, is either my health or my writing.
Gaming is always there, sitting in the background. But the way I interact with it is what
shifts. For example, during this period
of prolonged and severe illness, I didn’t feel like I had the brainpower to
play any terribly intense or demanding games or really do any meaningful work
(aside from typing up some assignments for my students which, turns out I did
wrong). So what did I do? Well, I slept a lot. I walked to Stop and Shop dressed a lot like
a crackhead and bought soup, tissues and salad fixin’s and then, while eating
my soup and drinking my tea, I sat down and listened to comedy podcasts while
playing Civ 5.
It was basically like shutting off my brain for a while and
letting it make its own little story. It
was an absolutely glorious waste of time, as Civ games are, and by the time I’d
finished I was ready for my next nap. I’d
been awake and stimulated long enough to stave off bedsores.
But all that time I spent playing Civ, which was indeed game
time, wasn’t really productive game time.
I’m milking it right now to write about it, but that’s because I have
almost nothing else to write about this week – I’ve been crazy sick and I just
closed on an apartment during my second week of teaching my first college
course, give me a fucking break! Instead
of Civ I could’ve fired up the copy of Quantum Conundrum that my friend Dan got
for me, or kept playing one of those bit-violence adventure games I threw down
a couple bucks for. There’s even an
impressive looking Rogue-alike about being a space pirate that I am absolutely
desperate to sink my teeth into which I’m not willing to let myself try before
I can think and learn the way I usually can.
Civilization has been filling in my game time with these
patient, penitent moments where I simply wish to let my mind wander, and I don’t
mean that as a knock to Civ at all. That’s
what Civ does better than any other turn based strategy game: it provides
players with periods of white noise where they get to relax before engaging in
brief, frenetic, precisely measured actions.
It’s a brain vacation which is simultaneously beautifully engaging even
as it is utterly bereft of real content, real direct challenge. There is math, invisible, wonderful, mostly
scrutible math, running in the background.
This is your real enemy. There
are no apparent puzzles, simply long, arching paths to victory that at times
must be chased or changed over to as warranted by the situation.
It’s white noise. It
blocks out other distractions and lets you, in those moments while your turn is
processing, realize thing you might not have otherwise realized. It lets you relax for a few minutes. It is, in a sense, everything that games
usually are not for me.
I normally play games to be engaged, to overcome challenges
and to experience a narrative of some sort, even if it’s a narrative I’m
creating on my own. The latter arguably
exists within the framework of Civ 5, but it’s in a muted, patient
fashion. It’s sort of delightful. And this is what my gaming has been over the
last week. A break, or a series of
breaks.
It’s not that I want for amazing narrative experiences. I’m still playing through Catwoman’s bonus
series in Arkham City, which is very narrative driven (and character driven)
and I’ve got a pile of games left to complete, many of which are quite. There are games I want to replay, just for
their narratives. But all these games
require an intellectual and emotional commitment that a few rounds of Civ do
not.
If a twist emerges in Civ (Arabia declares war on me,
shattering our alliance!) I can backtrack to a few autosaves and prepare myself
a little more so I don’t lose one of my precious few cities in their harsh
initial strike. I have no such brace
against the death pervading the most recent Walking Dead episode or the brutal
puzzles of Quantum Conundrum. Civ allows
me to give only the tiniest piece of myself over, and in so doing, it lets me
recover and restore. It lets me waste
time the way television used to, but in a slightly more productive way. I never have shower moments with the
television blaring.
What I’m saying, I guess, is that there’s always time, even
if it doesn’t seem like there is. We
make it. We carve it out for
ourselves. And sometimes it’s just that
we’re not using that time quite as we want to.
I get why a friend of mine exclusively plays Civ when he isn’t grading
student papers after sharing a life experience, briefly and minimally, with
him. It’s a nice break, it’s rewarding
and, in the end, it’s not hard to walk away from if something more important
comes up (which it’s likely to at present).
That’s both a boon and a curse.
