Trying to explain

I can't really get annoyed at others who find it difficult to understand my condition. After all, I lived inside it for five decades and didn't understand it very well.


I was talking with my dear one last night, after we had finished a game of Left 4 Dead 2. She, being a normally motivated person, wants to up the difficulty of the games we play so as to get a greater sense of accomplishment at winning. I don't. I never play video games at anything other than the Very Easy setting, because I get nothing from it. She's trying to understand that, but it's hard, especially for a former CounterStrike player.


So why play the games at all? I certainly don't get a kick out of "winning," at any difficulty level. If I've been enjoying the game, my feeling when it ends is more one of sadness than anything else, especially with slower-paced RPG games like Fallout: New Vegas, which ends by detailing the consequences for other people and organizations of all the decisions you have made during the game. (It's virtually impossible to have a completely happy ending, by the way -- somebody always gets screwed.) Sometimes I don't bother to go to the ending at all -- I've never finished Crysis, for example, because I find aliens in video games mostly asinine. But I've played the first and middle parts again and again.


Process. Process is all. I'm closing in now on a thousand hours of playing Fallout: New Vegas alone, which is a bit lunatic, especially for a single-player game. It's because I focus on process. When the game ends, it's always tempting to see what another character with other attributes would make of it. I'm playing a woman now (for some reason I only play women) who has Strength, Charisma, and Luck maxed out at the expense of other attributes. It's worked fairly well, at least better than I feared. I've developed her Barter attribute to 80+ when I usually just ignore that part of character development, with interesting effects on the game as a whole (shitloads of money make a difference here, as anywhere). Now she's working her way through the add-on campaign Dead Money, with me wondering whether my original skimping on Perception is going to screw up my relationship with the mute Christine. Oh well. I suppose I'll survive it. But I also suspect I'll be back with a character with Perception maxed out, just to see what happens to the flow of the game under those different conditions.


Process. It fascinates me. The journey, rather than the arrival. I need to stay in the middle of things always. That's harder than it sounds.