Holding Pattern

One of the reasons I posted about three potential new games yesterday is that I feel like I'm in a bit of a holding pattern right now, when it comes to gaming. It's nothing new or unusual. I think most of us go through it at one time or another.

Krikket was talking about not being able to settle down to playing any particular game for more than a few minutes before losing interest and wandering off to something else. Syp, as usual, has been looking ahead, preferring the as-yet unspoiled excitement of gaming tomorrow to the frayed and worn familiarity of gaming today.

I'm feeling a little of both. Occasionally I wonder whether it's gaming that's losing its hold on me, not the individual games. It wouldn't be the first of my deep and abiding interests to fall away to nothing but bittersweet memories. 

There are a few such lost obsessions in my life. I can name them all because for a time I felt they defined me. I won't, though. Not right now. I'll save that for Blaugust. It'll fit nicely into Introducing Yourself week. I have a couple of ideas for that to avoid repeating myself from previous years.

Sticking to the point, for once, I feel that rather than losing interest in playing games per se, I'm a little disconnected from the process. Time was, the inside of a game seemed bigger than the outside. It's been a while since it felt that way. 

Although, actually, not that long, I guess, when I really think about it. Valheim wrapped me up for a while. I got drawn into Chimeraland's craziness for a couple of months. It can still happen.

It doesn't last, though. Not for long. It's weeks not months, months not years. Is it just a function of having done this for so very long, now? Is it an inevitable wearing-down of the receptors? Does the dopamine just not hit the way it did? 

Or is it the games? Does the way they're made-to-fit today leave too little room for wonder? When no-one knew what to do, did they do it better? Now there's a map do we miss getting lost?

All of that and more. And less. Sometimes a slow patch is just a slow patch. Shouldn't read too much into it.

Then there's anticipation. That's a double-edged claymore, isn't it? The future smells so sweet it makes the present taste bland, sometimes.

Take Palia. I didn't even want to play the game. I'd read a little about it and it sounded... okay. Not that interesting. I certainly wasn't hanging around waiting for it. Now I am, apparently. And Tarisland. It was just a curiosity until I got a taste and then they took it way and now I want it back.

I'm even quite... excited isn't exactly the word but it's headed in that direction... to get the Hildir's Request patch for Valheim. That's the one with the difficulty sliders. It's been on the Public Test Server for a month now. It must be due to go live soon.

I'm not sure if you'll be able to apply those sliders to an existing world. If you can, I'll finally be able to get my corpse. If not, though, I'm quite keen to start over with the world set to something much closer to a sandbox, so I can just concentrate on building and forget about surviving.

Immenence has its own issues. If something's way off down the line it's easy to put it aside for now. Shunt it into a siding of your one-track mind and let it idle there. When it's barelling down the rails right at you, getting bigger every day, it's harder to ignore.

Except when it's really super-easy. It was only when I read that post of Syp's I remembered there's an "expansion" coming soonish for Guild Wars 2. And I even wrote about the damn thing not much more than a couple of weeks ago.

I can't ever have been less interested in an upcoming expansion for a game I supposedly play, surely? And I do still play GW2, right? I mean, if not, why did I bother to claim that code for free dyes from Amazon Prime yesterday?

Rhetorical questions. There is no "play". There is only playing and I'm not playing GW2. I expect I will again, one day, but if I don't it won't matter. Everything has its season.

It isn't only games, either. Blaugust is sucking all the air out of the blogging room right now. I keep thinking of ideas and putting them aside for August. I did it just now. You saw me.

The upshot is, I have plenty to blog about but not much to post. Which is why you get to read this instead of something more interesting and why I'm going to stop here. Also, it's summer and it's finally stopped raining and Beryl just woke up so I think I'm going to take her for a walk.

I'm working tomorrow so I won't be back until Thursday. Let's hope I have something to post about by then or things could get ugly.