Sometimes I wonder what it'd be like to just play games without even thinking about them. What it would be like to do anything without thinking about it is probably what it would be like to play games without thinking. What do I do on a daily basis that I don't think about like someone who's thinking about it? Maybe eating, when I eat something I don't always wonder how it was made. But sometimes I do. Do like, woodworkers walk through houses and notice how they're put together? Sometimes I feel like it's almost my curse to notice the stitches on everything, but I can't be the only person. When I read things I look at what they're trying to do, when I watch movies I try and see how they're put together. And when you've been playing games for twenty-odd years I guess you start to hack them apart in your mind too.

Inline Image

I've been back at Super Mario 3D Land the last couple days, spurned on for whatever reason, maybe a misplaced sense of anticipation for New Super Mario Bros. 2, and I can't help just noticing the things in each level. Even though I'm no game designer I just question if the way I see the game is the way like, Joe Taco sitting across from me would see it. How long is it until not everything's as impressive as it was the first time? Lately I've been looking at how games fit into my life each day in an effort to sniff out the ideas, the Something that I'll be able to write down later on for this post. That only causes me to think about it even more.

Maybe more interesting to me than anything I've actually observed about games lately is that I have, for the most part, been able to come up with something mostly every day, or every other day at the least, for roughly the last two months. Each time I've been able to find something in my life that relates back to games, some gaming-related object or activity in my life each day. I wonder about the gardening blogs, Garden-sider, like do they always have something new? Maybe it's easier even than this, since gardens and plants are something that you just experience, and always in a different way from someone else, whereas with games I'm playing the same game anyone else is playing. Maybe it's harder cause gardening mostly is about plants.

Inline Image

Today was a weird one though. I cruised through the day barely thinking about games, nothing really poppin' up, even though I played some 3D Land on the train and claimed up my StreetPass tags. But you know, I went out for lunch, I recorded some CDs for a few of my students, I watched The Dark Knight since I have been wanting to see it after seeing Rises a couple days ago. I watched some Olympics. And then I realized that it was time to write this, and I didn't have it, there wasn't that thing up there that I usually reach out for and find. I thought maybe I'd write about pinball games. But it wasn't ripe yet.

And now here I am. I try to let the idea guide me that I won't put anything on here that doesn't need to exist, that doesn't say anything. But in a way the fact that it's gotten me today, the fact that the best I've got is how I've got nothing, makes its own point up there in my mind. Maybe this is what it feels like to do something without thinking about it, without noticing how it all fits together. This is that day where even though I played some games, kinda let games cross my mind, remembered that Dragon Quest X comes out today, nothing made much of an impact. Games were just games and nothing else, a couple cornstalks in the ground pushing up slow enough for me not to notice them, fast enough that I'd be surprised by them later, after I stopped thinking about them, after I came back to check.