Of my time playing Dragon Age : Inquisition, that is.

I finally reached the point where I had done all the dicking around doing subquests and side missions I could reasonably do and it was time to advance the main plot.

I hadn’t done everything there was to do in the game. Didn’t get all the shards, didn’t close all the rifts, didn’t figure out a few quests that puzzled me, etc.

But I did all that I truly cared to do. Past a certain point even a dedicated dilly-dallying specialist like myself begins to get the itch to move on and finish the game.

So around noon today, I pulled the trigger and initiated the final section of the game.

And it was war. The final act in these games is always war. I guess that it’s such an easy dramatic conclusion to a medieval fantasy storyline that game devs just can’t resist. After all, the stakes have been rising throughout the game.

And what is higher stakes than war?

That said, I hate war in video games. War is chaotic and messy and there is too much going on for my liking, and I prefer the simplicity of it being just me and my crew versus a bunch of evil things.

That said, the game kept it fairly simple. Just a lot of one on one battles between my side’s forces and the bad guy’s.

I join in and we kill the crap out of them. Easy.

And I mean we REALLY kill the crap out of them, because the battles were all super easy due to the fact that I had done so much adventuring beforehand.

Like, the recommended character level for the end part was between 16 and 19, and me and my peeps are like level 26.

And of course, as is fitting, the end game is long and elaborate. Took me around three hours to get through most of it.

Yeah, I said “most of it”, because the game goddamned crashed when I had just “tamed” the dragon I am to ride into the final fight.

And by “tame”, I of course mean “beat the shit out of”.

Now there’s a lesson for the kids. Remember, boys and girls, you can always use violence to make an animal love you.

Hell, it works in Pokémon. And the best part is you can then make them fight each other for your own glory and amusement!

It’s like every evil kid’s dream. You even get to still be the good guys!

Now I am really, really, hoping that the only reason the game crashed was that I had been playing for three hours and my graphics card got overheated.

If that’s the case, when I go back and try again, it should work fine.

But if it crashes again, I may have to turn the graphics settings down in order to get the frigging thing to work.

Which would be a bit sad. I have everything on maximum right now and I love it. Everything in the game looks fantastic.

And that’s for a game that is ten years old. Which tells me that graphics really got as good as they need to be at least ten years ago.

I literally cannot imagine them looking better.

So that’s where things sit right now. When I resume, so will the “taming” of the dragon, and hopefully, this time it won’t frigging crash.

And that’s what is going on in that thing I have instead of having an actual life.

I know it’s an addiction and it’s ruining my life, but… I need it.

But I guess that’s how addiction works, isn’t it?

More after the break.

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About that addiction

I’ve talked about this subject in this blog before so I will try to avoid repeating myself too much here tonight, but it’s an important subject that I feel the need to address.

I am hopelessly addicted to video games. To the point where they are simply the default thing I do when I am not doing anything else.

Basically, if I am awake, alone, and not blogging, I am playing a video game. The only thing that changes is whether I am playing them on my tablet (aka My Black Mirror) or my PC (aka Mister Computer or “the big computer”).

And I can’t imagine giving them up. Hell, it’s hard for me to even imagine going without them for an hour or two in order to do productive things, like look for freelance work.

That’s how utterly dependent I am on the safety blanket of gaming. With gaming always within easy reach, I never have to face the massive existential void of figuring out what the hell to do with myself.

That is a nontrivial problem when you are disabled. You have all those hours to fill and not nearly enough things to fill them.

And a functionally infinite number of possible things to do. And that’s not good for someone like me with serious decision issues.

Option overload comes far, far too easily for me. That is what happens when you are so alienated from your own emotional core that you don’t have desires to guide you and push you towards this or that possibility.

Then all you are left with is your overgrown intellect, and it fails spectacularly at the task because there are far, far, far too many variables in that equation for anyone to solve.

So you live life on autopilot. You keep doing the things you’ve been doing. Not because that’s a good or a bad idea or the “right” thing to do, but because without emotion or intellect to guide our actions we simply keep repeating our default program.

I don’t know what I want. I don’t know if I want. I know that as a live sentient being I must have drives and desires like every other animal, but I am so out of touch with myself that I have no idea what they are.

So what can I do?

No seriously, I’m asking. Tell me. What can I do?

Actually, don’t bother. No matter what you say, I will simply come up with a nigh infinite number of reasons I can’t do it.

Because deep down, fundamentally, I am still in the grips of the bad part of my brain and it sees motivation as a threat and all change as bad and until I get over that, it doesn’t matter what anyone suggests to me.

I will shoot it down somehow.

I just can’t help myself. Yet.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow