Would you like to play a game of thermonuclear war?

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:20:52 GMT

So, skipping back to the Monday before last, here's what I've been up to the past 3 weeks: bookkeeping; bookkeeping recovery; birthday (good catch greylock in a_carnal_mink-land). Now I'm back to bookkeeping, but at a more sedate pace.

Barring some volunteering, bookkeeping for Dad's Small Business is about all I've got for work these days (it's certainly not just busy work: the worst of chunk of the bookkeeping I was doing was for taxes that were more than a year overdue). :o

So what else have I been up to? Let's go with Ridiculous Internet Games (but that hasn't just been the past 3 weeks).

Y'see once upon a time whatifoundthere linked to this fascinatingly silly game called My Brute where you get a little caveman of sorts & let it fight against other little cavemen. This is interesting for about 30 seconds since the "game" amounts to "click a button & watch your random caveman do random things against other random cavemen". Nonetheless, before I knew what a non-game it was I'd bookmarked it & sometimes I'd notice the 'mark, click on it, & remind myself of the pointlessness (at least the company recognized the uselessness: they came out with a 2nd version that gave you a titch more control & then later came up with a 2nd game, Minitroopers, which probably takes the Make Your Little Guys Fight Other Little Guys concept up yet another step. The latter is also the 1st game I've encountered that won't let you sign-up w/o using someone's "referral link"; it seems to be big into encouraging pyramid-scam style army recruiting).

Anyway "My Brute" seemed to go down ridiculously often (indicating that, for a non-game, it actually appeared shockingly popular) & when this happened the company responsible had clickable links to their other free games... & one day I noticed they have a Breakout clone, which you gives you 3 turns a day starting at 6pm EST ('cause that is midnight in France where the company, Motion Twin, is based).

This was all well & harmless until, desperately seeking distraction, I started bouncing through all their games until I found Die2Nite. D2N is totally unlike any of their other games. It is what you make of it and, for quite a while, what I wanted to make of it was my life. Not since the Discworld MUD in highschool had I gotten so deeply sucked into a virtual world (pretty dangerous for me to learn now it's still going but I will resist!).

( Just what sort of a game is this here "Die2Nite"? )

D2N was especially engaging to me 'cause in addition to being distracting it was also encouraging: when I could accurately run the calculations on how many zombies the town could take before we're all eaten or shift the town from a motley crew of random crazies toward something resembling an organized force I was pleased & started to think (at a time when I felt like I could do absolutely nothing at all) I could actually do things (even things I'd never thought I could do before: like on-the-fly ~~zombie~~ math).

Playing D2N kept making me think of two major things: 1) The TED Talk positing that maybe we can shift, uh, "gamer power" to start saving the world, and, 2) to paraphrase something in a Cracked article summing up a bit of a blog post from a game designer: you play these games to avoid life.

After all, I did say I hunted this thing out when I was desperate for distraction. Well, now I'm not desperate for distraction anymore. I just like being distracted. I like it much more than not being distracted and trying to face finding work that isn't just, say, random bookkeeping jobs from random places (especially since, and totally self-damningly, I don't believe I will).

So, once this week is up, it's time to put the imagination zombies away in their box and face what I don't want to face. I keep thinking that I should make a game of it: if I find work... If I stop wanting distraction... then... I win. Just need to keep finding it amusing when the IRL zombies try to eat me instead of completely, totally, terrifying.

***

Edit: & now I learn reddragdiva also has 'zombies' as their post theme today (so if you're not interested in game zombies, or IRL zombies, you can have some philosophical zombies).

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DWT

Would you like to play a game of thermonuclear war?