Bleak Late Night Delving

Though I've always stood by multiplayer games (since Bubble Bobble, for the record), the implications of my rediscovered "love" for single player xbox games like Vice City trouble me.

I suspect that it's still compulsion driving me, ninety percent of the time. It's rare that I'm actually hungry, for example, but I can always eat.

Likewise with video games, television, blogging, prettymuch everthing I do often: there's a vague urge, most of the time, but nothing bigger driving those activities. More and more often.

The worst implication here is that our admittely more-idealistic hero of yesteryear, a sentimental fellow who wrote about his "last videogame" once, is dead.

Which would mean that Our Bold Hero is now merely a creature of appetites and apathy, untethered from the (for him) increasingly problematic idea of a "soul." And with nowhere grand to go, nowhere to get all dressed up for, as they say…

I've certainly become, consciously, more hedonistic of late…

It's not the only possible implication, of course. But tied to my attitude towards single-player videogames (perhaps, for you Dear Reader, a bit inexplicably), I see a new Our Bold Hero and a new war.

Not between Pragmatism and Idealism (the old war, settled in a draw at Pragmatism's behest), but between Hedonism and Anhedonia.

Perhaps there are older forces at work as well, from the old war or still older internal wars or from peaceful and dustier corners of my mind. But right now those two have the field, and I'm having a great deal of trouble telling fuzzy concepts like "desire", "compulsion", etc., from each other with all the dust my little pair of would-be gods are kicking up.

There are things, important things, which I just can't summon up the enthusiasm to care about, and there are trivial stupid things I enjoy very much and often. It's probably one of those human condition things, but it bothers me.

It bothers me more than anything else I can think of; which goes to show that I'm selfish.

By the way, I seem more sentimental here about this whole vaguelly philosophical line of thought than I actually feel at the moment. It's my slightly bombastic writing style, I suspect.

Everything is a little more sentimental when I'm writing, because I like to use a lot of longwinded words, just like all those authors I don't like do. Look at how much I wrote here. You get a silver star if you read this far.

Now imagine what would happen if I had a computer with me all the time. That's why I don't need a laptop again. Although…

I'm not daft enough to see internal struggles as battles between polar opposites, for the record. But if I had to choose (and, oddly enough, this is probably (that, or "anhedonia", is the word of the day: probably) my old friend Anhedonia talking) I'd choose Hedonism.

Then I'd start looking for something better. And with that, I go upstairs to enjoy some Vice City on my Xbox, my beloved Xbox.