Post 20: Three Days of No Minecraft!

I'm going to take a step away from my normally deep, thought-provoking (you can read that in a sarcastic tone if you wish) and tell you about something I did over this weekend. If you view my Twitter updates then you realize I'm hardcore addicted to Minecraft. That posed a problem to me. I would just log into it and do nothing really for periods of time instead of either being productive in real life or working on projects in the game. So I made a decision that, for three days, I would not do anything related to that game. I would not play it, I would not visit websites associated with it, I would not watch videos of it, nothing. I started that Friday, 1 April, and would not finish until Monday, 4 April.

As it turns out, it wasn't all that difficult! The first day I certainly had to remind myself a few times not to do my usual things and I got better quickly. This comes at a time the game had gone through an update, so I would miss the rush of new things entering the game. I got progressively better over the weekend.

With that distraction out of the way I found plenty of free time. I got bored, a lot. I quickly got back into two of my passions that had died out in time: programming and writing. One of my dreams is to release a multiplayer browser-based space battle game and a project I've been on and off with (mostly off) is sort of a simulation of it. I spent a good deal of time building it and have accomplished a lot. It's not done and there are a few bugs but it's closer to completion now. Insofar as writing, I'm working on a project called "After Adults", and you can see it here: http://afteradults.blogspot.com. Although I didn't do any writing I've gotten lots more planning of it done. I'm using actual cities for the setting but for a couple of them I may need to silently skip or even reuse places - author's prerogative, a wonderful thing.

Yet even with all that being done there were lots of times when I was just sitting at the computer idly viewing the same websites over and over. I did accomplish a lot more school stuff than I have recently but I don't care much for the classes so I sort of put those off to last. I pushed myself a little bit with those.

About the third and last day of no Minecraft I looked at another game I had tried downloading a few times but got discouraged given the size of the download file (1.25 GB!): "Genesis AD". I thought it was simply a variation of Halo and to a degree it is. But there's a big difference from what I've seen. The game is entirely based on PvP and from there you achieve rewards for completing missions - say, from playing on a certain field of getting a set number of kills at once. It's a first person shooter and once I got the hang of it, I found it quite nice. The main problem is that I'm so twitchy that once I start shooting, I can't keep my aim straight. Plus I have no concept of strafing while firing, and there are very few places for sniping, which is my best ability.

Now, I'm back in the whole Minecraft thing, back to the old routine. Hopefully it won't start consuming all my time again but we've seen how that turns out!