I’m going to try to be more regular with this so many apologies and double apologies to the one (1) of you who maybe thought I was actually going to write about food and instead got this
I have a confession. Every day for the last two months, I have trekked into the living room, booted up a half-broken, 10-year-old Xbox 360, and played the beautiful game, Grand Theft Auto V.
The game is good, but it’s not great by any means. I haven’t made any progress in the story since 2016, I’m not all that good at it, and my players don’t have nice cars. But the game is safe. There’s no real repercussion for your failures (getting wasted by the cops), and any violence or degeneracy you commit is confined to the sunny SoCal beaches.
If I were to psychoanalyze myself, I would say that it is convenient, that when the world is uh………………stressful, I run for a game that reminds me of sophomore year of high school, and is set in a locale that I have romanticized to hell and back (don’t ask me about TV shows set in LA).
I’m not really sure what I’m trying to say about this observation though. I certainly don’t mind that for an hour or so every day I sneak away to try to see how many pixels I can blast before either the cops back me into a corner or my RAM overheats.
But the thing is, it’s not even that fun. Every time I finish playing I feel exhausted, unsatisfied. I didn’t learn anything, I didn’t watch or consume anything new. I did the same thing that I’d been doing since I tapped shoulder in a GameStop asking someone to buy the game for me, I went through the motions.
Certainly isn’t going to stop me from booting it up again though.