Why I'm Weird and Don't Like Games

This morning's sunrise, via my phone's panorama function that I didn't know I had!

Good to learn something new before the sun is even up.

This "random words for topics" theme this year will prove interesting. Especially when we have contrary Word Whores who chose words like this week's: Adz.

Kristine chose it apparently because it's great for word games. Which is really quite typical of her. She and her family like to play games of all sorts. My family? Not so much. Aside from a brief love-affair with Trivial Pursuit back in the 80s, we just never played that many games. Unless you count extended dinner debates as a game, which it virtually was for us - with a convoluted and equally debatable point system.

Thus, whether by nature or nurture, possibly a combination of both - I've never really liked playing games. Of any kind. Not board games, not video games, not role-playing games. I've never once played Angry Birds. They always feel kind of like a waste of time to me.

The one time I recall being interested in a video game was Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, which a friend of friends had on his computer and no one knew how to play. (Note that this was also in the late 80s.) Oddly, I don't remember it being funny. I became obsessed with solving the mystery of it and played it non-stop for a weekend until I finished it. Then I was done and I had no desire to start anything else.

Something that makes me a strange creature to my friends.

The thing is - I didn't really enjoy being that obsessed. I felt drawn in to the point that I had to solve the game, but once I finished, I experienced a rush of relief at being free of the damn thing. (And possibly at being able to escape the friend of friends' house, who'd mistaken my fascination with the game with interest in him.) Afterwards, I felt empty and incomplete, too. No great satisfaction in accomplishment, just nothingness where the obsession had been.

Maybe it's not much that I don't like games, but that I resent the way they can hijack my attention. Especially when they deliver so little in the way of lasting satisfaction for me. In fact, they often leave me with the restless sensation that I need to find another game to fill that hole.

I probably experience the same arc with books, both in reading and writing them, but without that empty sense of having wasted the time.

All of this leaves me feeling like the odd-woman out, in a world of people who love games of all types. Alas.