I just returned from a week-long vacation, where I unplugged and went on a hiking trip with my wife and some family, and while I took my Switch along for the ride, I can proudly admit that I only turned it on twice, once to play some Mario Kart 8 with my brother-in-law, and again while in the back of the RV one night to play some SEGA Classics (the only reason for that being that it was too dark to read.)
While I have nothing against the Switch, it was a great feeling to know that I am still capable of peeling myself away from my gaming habit to enjoy the simpler things in life, like dangling from a rope over a 70 ft cliff and riding my mt. bike along the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.
As I had posted previously, I had recently been grinding away at Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. It was a borderline obsession. I was spending almost entire days playing through the game. By the time I completed the main story tasks, I was experiencing a heavy dose of gamer fatigue. It wasn’t anything any other hardcore gamer hasn’t felt from time to time, but even though I had no desire to play anything in particular after the Odyssey marathon, it didn’t prevent me from turning on a console and flipping through the games, the same way someone addicted to tv will flip through the channels or Netflix tiles and complain that there’s nothing to watch. I was compelled to play, but whether it was out of habit, boredom, or the legit need to play was a question I didn’t have the answer to.
Until now. Not only was I completely happy on my trip, I never had the over-whelming desire to play anything. Not even solitaire on my phone. It’s not like my brain was occupied 100% of the time, either. We drove from South-Central Texas to Arizona, then Utah, and then back again. While I had my turns at the wheel, I still had a lot of downtime on my hands; I was stuck in an RV for a week, after all. I had plenty of opportunities to boot up the Switch. Now, I will admit my Switch library isn’t exactly extensive, and I don’t really have anything that requires for than a few minutes worth of play time in any given sitting, but my mind wasn’t even on gaming.
This is a huge relief for me. The way I’d been hitting up the gaming lately, I had a real concern that I was going to be a stick in the mud on the trip, with my mind just thinking about getting back home and grabbing my controller. I did have a brief moment when I saw there was a television in the RV and I joked that I could’ve brought the Xbox, but it was a light-hearted jest that didn’t have any real lament or meaning behind it. I wasn’t bummed that I “missed out” on getting quality gaming time.
Upon arriving back home this morning, around 10 a.m., the wife and I were confronted with a couple of headaches — the kind which usually rear their ugly heads upon returning to a home after being gone for a week. After that though, we enjoyed our first true “alone time” in a week, went to the grocery store, came home, I cooked dinner, we watched some Restaurant Impossible, I watered the garden, and even now, after cleaning up the kitchen a bit, instead of doing some gaming (the console is on, btw,) I’m sitting here writing for my blog.
Sure, I want to play, and I will do so shortly. But I don’t feel like I need to play. And that is a huge fucking relief.
