Video Game Meditation
I've been spending a lot of time in video game meditation recently. It's a combination of factors, I think, that led me here. The endless winter gray and gloom. The decline of Western Civilization. The loneliness of recently relocating from one side of the country to the other. It's all led to a really severe buzz of noise in my brain, like fifteen hives full of bees, all swarming just behind my eyes. Relentless.
And so here I am now, ignoring the books I want to read, not touching the novel I'm writing, not being productive in any but the smallest of things. Not able to really focus in the ways that I want to. It's quite possible that I've got a little low-grade depression going on, and really now, can you blame me? I'm envious of anyone who can really function in the world right now. I don't know how you all do it, honestly. More power to you.
For me, I have found that laying on the couch with a video game controller in my hands is what's been keeping me quiet and sane for the past few weeks. Frequently, there is a cat sleeping on my chest, which also doesn't hurt. Almost never do I turn up the volume on what I'm playing, preferring to just listen to the sound of the wood pellet stove and the ambient room tone. I'm trying to fall into a state of mind that is both weirdly focused and detached at the same time, and cutting back on the amount of distracting stimuli around me is important to that. I don't want to smother my monkey mind completely, but I want it to take a couple of chill pills and sit still for a while.
I've found that my meditative gaming has weirdly focused on mainly two titles right now, a pair which are completely at opposite ends of the spectrum from one another. The first is No Man's Sky, which is a space exploration game. It's been around a while, but for those of you who aren't gamers, it's essentially a game in which you fly your spaceship from one planet to the next, and more or less just land and wander around and look at things, maybe take a few photos to look at later, like a virtual space tourist. Without getting too technical, the game mathematically recreates an entire universe for you to flit about in, and generates planets and moons for you that are the size of actual planets and moons, so you essentially have an infinite amount of places to go and things to look at. Much of it is very pretty, and there isn't terribly much to do other than explore, which is wonderful for being meditative. I land on a planet with glowing grassy fields, and wander around for an hour or two, looking at the strange animals that dot the landscape, or explore vast cave systems under the ground, or dive to the bottoms of deep undersea trenches. It's very relaxing.
The other game I can't seem to step away from at the moment is an oldie but goodie, a zombie-shooting nightmare called Left 4 Dead. It is the complete opposite of No Man's Sky. There is no endless wandering through beautiful landscapes, and there is nothing inherently relaxing about it. The goal of the game is to shoot and slash your way from Point A to Point B without being devoured by hoards of zombies, and that's about it. It's very tense, claustrophobic, and brutal. And yet for some reason, it puts me into the same state of calm that No Man's Sky does. Maybe it's a familiarity with the virtual world of Left 4 Dead, a feeling of homecoming, since I've been playing this game off and on since 2008. It's soothing in a weird sort of way, and even though I'm focused on what I'm doing in the game, I'm also detached from it at the same time. Playing this old game now is sort of an adventure in muscle memory, and my brain can get in the backseat and just look out the window for a while, and watch the scenery roll by.
We're all doing what we can right now to keep functioning, to keep moving forward, and for the moment at least, this is what's working for me. I start a new job in a little over a week, which will get me out of the house and help me focus on something other than the brain bees and mind monkey in my head wrestling with one another. It'll be good to get back into a routine of some kind, because I think I've had too much down time and far too much mind time recently to be good for myself.
Until then, though, I've got planets to explore and zombies to hack.
I am one Zen motherfucker.
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