Did you ever have one of “those” days? You know the one that I mean: the day where everything just seems to go wrong.  When you finally get through “one of those days” what do you do?  Most folks I know get home, empty their pockets, take care of a few household tasks and sit down in front of the TV with some “comfort food”. 

Comfort food is just one of those little things that just help us get by.  In fact, it may even be the reason that you got through that crappy day.  There you are at work getting yelled at by the boss or seeing that deadline for the project getting ever closer and in the back of your mind you are thinking, “I can’t wait to get home and have some (insert favorite comfort food here)”.  We’ve all seen those commercials where a lady has a bad day at work; she comes home, flips off her shoes and sits down in front of the TV with a spoon and a quart of ice cream.

For me the comfort food is not food, but beer.  When I have a crappy day I sit down with the darkest thickest beer that I can find in the house, typically Guinness or some other equally thick, dark syrupy beer that just seems to push all of the right stress relief buttons.   After finishing one off, life just seems right and all of the petty little issues of the day just seem to melt away.

Some of you may be asking yourself, “This is all nice Dave and I can relate, but what does this have to do with gaming?”  Let me tell you, this has everything to do with gaming.

When you have that crappy day, do you ever come home and fire up your favorite first person shooter?  I am referring to the kind of game you play just to shoot everything in sight to blow off some steam?  That’s what I am talking about; I call it “Comfort Gaming”.

We all have our favorites.  That game you play after getting frustrated by playing WOW for six hours just to have your character killed near the end of a quest.  Or playing Halo 3 online, and you just you just can’t seem to “get your game on”.  Many of us have a favorite fallback game.  It is often not the latest, greatest game on the market.  Indeed, it can be some small, almost insignificant game.  When I am writing these articles and I get stuck, I sometimes take a break and fire up FreeCell or Hearts just to clear my mind.

I recently fired up one of my old comfort games, Diablo.  Diablo is your standard RPG/dungeon-crawler in which you go around and kill everything in sight and slowly level your character up. This game is benign by today’s standards and the graphics are standard VGA at best, but it is a predictable game. I think that is one of the components of a comfort game, predictability.  We know that we can sit down to this game and 30 minutes or an hour later, feel good about our gaming experience.

So the next time you have a crappy day at the office, or some jerk cuts you off on the road, go home, fire up your favorite video game, grab a drink or a bag of chips, and relax with some “Comfort Gaming”.

Did you enjoy this article? Please bookmark it onto: