Have you ever grown tired of gaming?  I don’t mean “I am bored of this game”-tired, but simply “I don’t feel like playing videogames for a while”.  No?  Well, let me tell you a story about a time when I did.

It was the early nineties, and I had just lost my job in IT to outsourcing.  I was scrambling to find a new one since I had recently married and our rent was due.  I would spend 10 hours a day pounding the pavement looking for the “right” job: one that would meet my career goals and include an enormous pay check.

After two weeks of fruitless searching, I came home and decided that I deserved a break so I cracked open a nice dark beer and headed for the game room.  My use of the term “Game room” may be a bit misleading, since I was living in a one bedroom apartment, which meant that the bed that I slept in and the dressers where I kept my clothes were also in my game room.

I fired up my 25 MHz - 386 with 4 MB of RAM, and decided that I was going to play…something.  After all I deserved it, right?  My game of choice back then was called Silpheed: a space based first person shooter.  The game had it all: flying, shooting, and strategy.  I settled in to what I thought was going to be a cathartic evening of gaming, but after about ten minutes I realized I wasn’t having any fun.  I wasn’t playing poorly, and was even able to shoot and kill whatever I wanted.  It just wasn’t satisfying.  I thought to myself, “OK, maybe this isn’t the game I should be playing right now”.

I looked through my system to see what else I had installed.  I came across my copy of Wing Commander, a similar game that I thought might fill my need.  Again, this was a space based 3D shooter that required a bit of skill to fly the ships and defeat the nasty Kilrathi.  I locked my missiles on and shot and killed many Kilrathi that day, but I was rewarded with no real feeling of accomplishment.

What was going on?  I was playing some of my favorite titles, and I was doing well.  I looked around to see what else I could play to try and get my fix.  So, I fired Solitaire on Windows 3.1 and played that.  I tried a few different scoring strategies to get me motivated, but alas, nothing was working and my beer was getting warm.
That’s when I decided to shut the computer off, grab a cold beverage, and head into the other room to relax for a bit.  And that’s when I saw it: an old crossword puzzle book.

I opened it up and immediately found a couple of crossword puzzles that I had not finished.  Examining the puzzle, I found the error that I had made which caused me to put the book down in the first place.  I spent the rest of the night, finishing the crossword puzzle book.

The point is, the real spirit of game is not in the medium used, but in the enjoyment it gives you.  I will be a gamer long after I can no longer see the TV and hold the controls, but I may just have to find a different way to play.

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