The Inscrutable Exhortations of My Soul

No, thanks. I'll just fall off.

Last weekend, my wife and I took a trip to Bar Harbor, Maine, to go "snowshoeing." Only there wasn't any snow, so we ended up doing an alternative, less romantic-sounding activity called "hiking in the cold." I've been to Bar Harbor more than 20 times, but one thing I've never done is wait until low tide and then hike across the bar that gives the town its name to Bar Island. Our bed-and-breakfast was relatively close to this natural land bridge, so we decided to do it.

Arriving on the other side, we found that the road diverged into a hiking path and an overgrown track marked "private road." The private road had manifestly not been driven down all winter, or even longer, so we decided the odds of encountering an angry landowner while trespassing were low. In less than half a mile of walking, the road ended in a clearing. There was no house but rather the ruins of one: a couple of chimneys and a low stone foundation overlooking the rocky coast. It looked to have been abandoned for a good century or so. (I later found out there was, until recently, a modern house in the clearing next to the ruin, but it and the land had been donated to the park and the house torn down. I haven't been able to find anything on the older house whose ruins were still visible to us.) I took this picture:

As I gazed at the sad and overgrown ruin, a strong and inescapable feeling crept over me: I wanted to go back to the hotel room and play a CRPG.

I realize how pathetic that sounds, even to fellow gamers. I was looking at something fascinating--a piece of history in a place that I loved. But there was never going to be anything else to stoke the sparks of mystery about the place. I have no doubt that the "private road" sign had failed to deter hundreds, if not thousands, of other hikers every year, and there was no chance I was going to find anything in the ruins that hadn't already been picked over by thousands of hands. I wasn't going to open the ash trap of one of the old chimneys and discover a previous owner's journal, detailing a horrific murder that had taken place decades earlier, but providing just enough mitigating clues to heal the heartbreak of a sad centenarian residing in some lonesome house in town. Orcs were not going to suddenly rise from behind the wall and snipe at me with bows. I was not going to find a chest nestled against the outer walls, containing a sword and helmet. The brambles tangled over the stone were not suitable for brewing into potions, nor did they conceal runic letters that, when absorbed, would bestow upon me some fantastic skill. I was not going to stumble upon a concealed trap door, leading me to treasure-filled depths.

While real life, and the real location, should have offered real rewards to compensate for these deficiencies, they were not, at the moment, enough. And so, after spending a respectable amount of time hiking the rest of the island, I used the promise of a fireplace, hot tea, and a good book from the store in town to persuade Irene to return with me to the confines of the bed-and-breakfast, where I spent the next four hours attempting to win Wizardry V. I failed, and I still don't know exactly what I'm going to do with that game, but I do know that...well, I'm back.

Looking over the comments from my "hiatus" posting, I'm amused by how many of you didn't understand my core problem. The suggestions that I change the nature of my blog by playing only "good" games, or switching to console RPGs, or doing "let's plays" instead of writing blog entries...none of them got at the real issue, which is that playing games, even in "moderation," takes a lot of time--time that, as a self-employed person, I could be using to make money. If I didn't feel like making money, it's still time I could be using to do other things that would help me in the long term: learning a new language, exercising, practicing the piano, reading great works of literature (or even my own professional journals), taking dance lessons. I had decided to stop the blog because when I sat down with my list of goals for 2012, I needed the time that playing games was taking away from me.

But this is what I discovered in the intervening month: I'm apparently going to spend a certain percentage of my time screwing around, whether said screwing around involves playing video games or watching Babylon 5 for the seventh time. I've made fair progress on my goals in February, but I've also spent a lot of time on Reddit, reading old articles on Cracked.com, reading the Mistborn trilogy again, and playing Boggle on my iPhone. None of these things are what I stopped playing CRPGs to do, and playing games, and writing this blog, while overall about as useful as anything else I've been doing, at least lets me document my experiences and interact with interesting people.

It was either this or a Boggle blog.

With that in mind, I have to figure out my next steps. I've left five games from 1988 in various states of incompletion: The Bard's Tale III, BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception, Sentinel Worlds, Star Command, and Wizardry V. The easiest thing to do would be to write them all off and start fresh with 1989, and I may do that, but I want to think about it first. Before I do, I'm going to offer a posting on the 1970s dnd, because I already have it half-written. Then we'll see about these other games.

I want to be clear, though: this is not the passion I would have chosen for myself. If I could design my own life, and identify the calling of my blood--the thing that, while hiking in some random part of the world, would suddenly fill my heart and mind with a palpable compulsion--it would not be computer role-playing games. Sure, I enjoy them--immensely--but I don't enjoy enjoying them. If that makes any sense. If you don't mind that paradox, I'm glad to have you as a reader.