I’ve been spending a lot of time reading articles like this, and, even though I really don’t play any games at all, I really like the idea of communicating an experience more directly than with just words. It’s interesting: a lot of the early uses for technology centered around this, with MUDs and Virtual Reality and all that, but everything sort of skipped off into a television-like experience of interactive fiction. Only recently is the genre making a comeback, and this time focusing on much smaller goals. Games such as these focus on only portions of life, or only abstract ideas that one is bound to run into.
I’m still stuck in the land of words, so most of what I did here was just kind of poke around the edges of this sort of thing. It was fun, but the fact that I don’t play any games, don’t have any experience in game design, means that I really felt like I couldn’t do much more. Oh well! I felt the need to do something like this rather than actually sit down and write about it. While I’m at it, though, I should note that I’ve been stuck in kind of a weird cycle of feeling pretty normal and relatively happy for about seven months, then just total soul-crushing depression for a month following that. It’s been a constant for most of my life, but only really in hindsight, and it’s only recently that I’ve started to actually work on working with this in a way that doesn’t involve making those around me feel terrible and doesn’t involve me trying to off myself. There’s not a whole lot else I can add in addition to “A Full Life”, so I won’t, suffice it to say that, thinking about that sort of thing constantly, minding the gap, as it were, is making this go-round much less crushing and much more…tiring. An improvement, even if only a small one.