If you’re a regular reader of Lore Hound, and you should be, then you likely noticed that my personal production has slide since the holidays of 2016 kicked off. It wasn’t any nefarious reason, simply life. I’ve more responsibilities in all facets of my slice of the rat race than I’ve ever had for any facet. That indeed means progress in those facets. That also means other facets have fallen off. Given what this slice of internet focuses on you can guess an area that has taken a bit of a backseat, gaming. This isn’t a “woe is unto me” about how my gaming has declined. Well, not exactly.
I realized my gaming was in such a dramatic decline primarily because I was running low on writing ideas. Hard to have them without the interactive muse. I wrote about leveraging gamedom to help with physical pain for Project Lore, but this was quite the opposite. Not the usage of, but lack of. The missing pairing made me realize something. Something rather important given how my life had recently been inundated with additional responsibilities. Stress and its relief.
You see stress sucks. It’s tightly linked to all sorts of negative health effects, things no one really wants, from weight gain to heart disease. I went through a bit of introspection after a listless period and realized that gaming, and writing about it, are probably my easiest modes of stress relief I’ve found. They’re highly repeatable, possible relatively anywhere, digestible with any chunk of time, fairly inexpensive these days – yay rise of F2P games – and rely on no one else. Discovery in hand, I’m now in the process of reorganizing my time to ensure I have games to keep me sane.
Yup, I’m min-maxing my real life.