How My Brain Works, Part Whatever Plus One

My son challenged me the other week, saying that I just buy games and never play them.

He's not wrong, given the number of paper and pencil RPGs and board games I own that I've never played. Gotten out of the box and devoured, yes, but actually played? No.*

The ironic thing is that prior to his challenge I had actually begun playing some of the video games I'd bought and sat in my inventory.

None of the RPGs that would likely suck me in for hours at a time, mind you, but some of the other games that scratch that building itch. Such as Old World, Surviving Mars, or the reimagining of Master of Orion.

This is the MOO I know, as I never played
the subsequent iterations of the game. And yes,
I know that MOO2 was supposedly better than
the first game. From Steamcommunity.

These three --and others-- can be as nit picky and as complex as you want them to be, but I can also step back and play them with only one eye on the details while I do other things. (Like listen to some of the meetings I'm required to attend but am only peripherally involved with at best.)

But still, I want to get a chance to play those long running single player RPGs.

***

Back when I played Ultima V I used to keep a notebook of all sorts of game info for easy reference. It helped me to know those details as there wasn't a quest system like that found in modern games, so a player had to keep track of everything to give them a chance at completing the story. Even before I formalized notebook usage I scribbled down info from Ultima IV and the original Bards Tale on scrap paper from my dorm room, because a busy college student needed this so they could get their coursework done and keep up with playing the game on an occasional basis.

I was taught how to take notes during
a seminar on studying we all had to take
in 8th Grade, but really it was the old
Colossal Cave adventure that got me started
on this path. From DOSGames.com.

Today, a lot of that bookkeeping is done for you by the games themselves. If the info isn't there, you can also find it on a wiki or somewhere else around the internet. That makes it easy to find answers, I suppose, but for me it also means it's harder to re-engage after being away for a while. I find this lack of direct participation in the note-taking and bookkeeping makes me sloppy, and it leads to me wanting to keep playing a game more so I won't forget what I've been doing. 

This isn't exactly a new phenomenon for me, because I experienced it firsthand in a few classes I had in college. 

A lot of my classwork while attending college revolved around how good I was at taking notes. Or copying equations down from the whiteboard or blackboard (yes, I'm old school), and the subsequent discussion surrounding the problem solving process. Some of those processes, such as solving for the Hydrogen atom in Atomic and Nuclear Physics class**, took about half of the semester. That meant that if you weren't keeping up on your notes, you were going to fall far behind very very fast. 

Here's the proof I actually took A&N
30+ years ago. (!) From Modern
Physics, by Paul A Tipler of
Oakland University. (My copy says 1978,
not 1977 that Goodreads says.)

However, there were a few classes that I had that the notes were passed out prior to each session, and then we discussed the notes in the lecture itself. At first, I thought this was absolutely great, because I wasn't spending my entire class writing so fast that my hand began cramping. I could focus on the concepts and not worry about missing anything. What ended up happening, however, was that I had less retention in those classes than the others.

Back when I was in high school, my teacher in my Physics class allowed us to create a "cheat sheet" on a 3"x 5" index card for use in our mid-term exam; we could cram as many formulas into the card as humanly possible, as long as it was on a 3x5 index card that he handed out a week prior to the exam. The nights before the exam I feverishly shoehorned every formula that I thought I might need into the card without requiring a magnifying glass, and on the day of the exam showed up --card in hand-- ready to go. What I discovered, however, was the act of me writing everything down as I reviewed what might or might not be important meant I committed to memory all of them, so I didn't need the cheat sheet at all.***

I am apparently one of those people who have to actively participate in the writing down of notes for me to retain them better. 

***

Why is this so critically important? Because if I'm going to play one of these single player RPGs, I'm going to have to ration my game time. 

I have multiple demands on my time, and while I thought that once the kids grew up and left for college I'd have more free time, I've found that my time has simply been filled up with other things that demand a slice of the pie. Therefore, unless I suddenly enter an alternate dimension --hey, don't laugh, because if the Cincinnati Bengals went to the Super Bowl in 2022 anything can happen-- I won't have a ton of free time to devote to playing these games to my heart's content. 

As you can see, keeping up with the games doesn't mean "more automated processes" for me at all, because that won't help nearly as much as me actually writing stuff down. I need that act of writing and note taking to make things stick, and therefore it's time to invest in a few notebooks of my own. I am going to play some of these games, and doing so will take discipline on my part; I guess I'm going to suck a bit of the fun out of those games by doing so, but I have to acknowledge reality.

And oh look, Back to School sales are going on right now, with plenty of notebooks to choose from...

Imagine that!
A partial snapshot of the Target
website on August 3rd, 2023.

#Blaugust2023

*There's actually a method to my madness with the pencil and paper RPGs, but that'll have to be on another post. Let's say that it has to do with worldbuilding and leave it at that for now.

**Hi, Dr. Craver! I'm almost 100% certain you don't cruise the net looking for where your name might show up, but if you do, it's great to see ya! Just wanted to let you know I've very fond memories of A&N as well as Physics 206, and I miss those times when you'd slyly sing the Hail Purdue fight song when we were talking Big Ten football after the Friday seminars. And I see that A&N has mutated into a "Physics IV: Modern Physics" class, which is fine by me. Times change, you know.

***Before you ask, yes, I got a really good grade on the exam. No, I'm not going to tell you what it was.