simonlife

I haven’t played a video game seriously in about a year. And by seriously, I don’t just mean picking up a controller at a friend’s house to test-drive a brand new title. At the very least, a serious gaming spree involves a few hours of devoted playtime over the course of a week and continues on for another week after that. My last big addiction was World of Warcraft, and come May, it will be almost a year since I terminated that phase of my life.

This Doesn’t Make Me Cool

Though it’s certainly tempting, I won’t pretend like my withdrawal from gaming is such a noble, virtuous thing. You’ve already heard my spiel about video games as a social phenomenon and about their merits as entertainment media; I’m not about to go back on all of that. It’s just that lately, I’ve been motivated to use my free time in other ways, which has necessarily wiped my mind of anything that would even remind me of video games. That’s right, I actually forget that they exist.

Is That It?

To be sure, high-resolution demo footage of a beautiful first-person shooter still turns me into a giddy, hedonistic pile of primitive human impulses, so it couldn’t be that I’ve just outgrown video games. (That, I’m sure, will never happen.) There must be a combination of factors involved, aside from the ridiculous idea that I could actually forget about video games all together, and I will attempt to enumerate them here:

• My desktop is outdated for today’s Shader Model 9.0 games, and I refuse to use my laptop—a device I’ve mostly apportioned for work—as an instrument of hardcore gaming. My desktop is nearly four years old without a single hardware upgrade and doesn’t really serve any purpose aside from being my personal jukebox and media player. I installed Unreal Tournament 2004 and Warcraft III on my laptop a while ago, but neither game has been run in months.
• Recently, I’ve been spending more time reading stuff. Be it Wikipedia, a design blog, an academic paper, or the Bboyworld forum, I’ve developed an addiction to all sorts of Web 2.0-enabled content. Sadly, nothing I read ever makes it to my hippocampus, so I never really learn anything.
• Video games are expensive! I’m not the most stringent of penny-pinchers or anything, but I find it increasingly distressing to try and reconcile being a college student and making a $50 guilty-pleasure purchase every now and again.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see whether my next gaming venture will be an old favorite (for its nostalgic value) or a completely new title. I’m faithfully devoted to the games I played in high school, but the industry is changing at a rapid pace these days, and for the better; it’d be a shame to be left behind.