Busywork

"You're the busiest person I know during the pandemic," Jason tells me.

Maybe? I don't know. I've been trying to arrange to play games nearly every night I can, reading when that isn't available. I don't get to go out, and while I do enjoy videogames, they are only occasionally available.

Besides; Doom Eternal has a unfun baked into that cookie.

A quick aside; Doom Eternal is glitchy for me. I stutter step about every ten to fifteen feet 'in game'. But let's say that this wasn't a problem AND I didn't have to do stupid registration for a game mode I'll never use AND the instruction screens were readable, AND they actually did story setup.  

Fine. It would still have this problem: walking on a tightrope isn't fun. There are multiple scenes in Doom Eternal where I have to make precise movement: either because I am jumping over the void, or because on one side of me is pain (electrical fence, fire, etc) and on the other side of me is the void.  

This is not fun. It has never been fun. It will never BE fun. Especially in a game that practically insists that you Tigger about in a desperate attempt to simultaneously stay alive and murder everything in the room.
It has made me hope that the game is over sooner rather than later, because the only excuse I have to play it is because a) I own it and b) pandemic. 

So yes, I am trying to stay busy. I'm even playing Magic: Arena and that isn't fun either.

Aside 2: Magic Arena's unfun comes in four different flavors. The first is one of mismatching: playing my crappy, scraped together collection of cards that they meagerly drip out is fine, so long as I'm playing against similar power levels. It isn't so much fun when I slam face first into the person with six planeswalkers, or a powered up, all rares R/W Zenith Flare deck.  

The second one is the dual currency. You cannot grind in Arena. The "money" they give you is worthless. Stop doing that. Either it is valuable or it isn't. If you want my fucking $20 to unlock a higher tier, just say that. Anything else is predatory and there to do one thing: disassociate people from the distinction between real money and "unreal" money so they don't understand that they are spending more than they should. 

The third one is on me: the transition between paper and electronic Magic has lead to unfun gameplay moments. The shortcuts I would use to do something work differently under the strict (but correct!) rules processing on Arena. I am trying to use this as a learning moment, not an enraging one, but it's not always easy. 

Finally, there is the lack of interaction. This is something Arena cannot fix. I have had "games" where I waited until the timer ran out on my opponent often enough that I won. Every game I play is marred by the experience of doing nothing while my opponent takes their turn. Nobody interacts; Magic is stripped down to cogs in a clock and as beautiful as that clock is, wiped from any human interaction, the game becomes  tiresome for me. I don't get to make friends and I don't know anyone playing so there's nothing to talk about. 

It did, however, make me appreciate what Twitch is useful for: If you're talking to an audience while playing, that provides an interaction that the opponent is unable to give you.  

However. It is true that I am staying busy. And I am trying to stay busy because without that, there is nothing to do but worry. There is much to worry about-not just the pandemic but the larger social, cultural landscape is deeply unsettling and frightening to me.

The work that I can do, I am doing. The support I can offer, I am doing my best to offer.

It is still difficult to focus and it is difficult to relax. Fun, when it arrives, is a bit like cocaine: I greedily take as much of it as I can, even when the moment isn't exactly appropriate. (I've played Arena at work, for example). Because it seems rare and fleeting.

I am reminded that I haven't built up community quite as much as I would like. I'm not bereft, I just have less people to interact with than would be comforting. These notions are oppressive on my brain and don't just make work difficult, they make doing the things I want to do difficult.

So I stay busy, working on Transformers decks, playing Star Realms, tweaking Magic decks, retiring some, beefing up others, while also trying to balance things in my life so I don't just peace out.

It's not easy. It's tiring, to be honest.

But it's also my responsibility to both continue to engage and to stay sane enough that I can do things to help make this situation better.

So I'm busy.