Fun dilemma

I have like forty games on Steam. I finished maybe three and played about ten of them?

I love to play games of course and that’s the problem. I manage to stop myself from doing it. Good games are addicting. Go, poker. It’s almost by definition.

Gamasutra has an article on the subject.

“Pleasure without learning only creates an empty experience that can be dangerously addictive.”

These days you don’t learn a lot with games, that’s for sure. There’s pleasure, a lot of it (“particles!!!!!!”) but I know I’ll end up playing them too much. It becomes the new TV the thing you do at night, mindlessly for more time than you should.

I already spent 40 hours in Torchlight and I kind of am falling into it again and want to play the second (engineer class!) despite knowing that I will just click a lot and watch visual effects rendered in real time on my computer.

I love computer games. I love them so much that I transformed a lot of things to games. Like following the tech industry and predict where it goes or how it works or riding bikes in the Car City or escaping people’s patterns on the sidewalk like I’m in Ikaruga… Quick, fun challenges.

I grind on my bass instead of grinding in a MMO. I don’t know, it never really stops.

I mean if fun is about learning and exploring I like to do so in the real world more, it’s more satisfying. Escapism is better achieved with music and movies, I feel. Not because of their passive nature but because content-wise games are lagging as I wrote a million time about it.

Right now it rains, it’s Saturday afternoon and I don’t know if I want to play some music -that is, grind on hand positions and keep the rhythm- or Torchlight. But I know which one will be more valuable.