As enjoyable as our trip back to New England two weeks ago was, I'm starting to regret the amount of time I took off work. For some reason, it seems that whenever I take more than eight hours of vacation time, I end up needing to take another eight or so hours of sick time just to shake whatever disease I come down with upon my return. Luckily, it's usually nothing more serious than a head cold or an allergy flare-up, but it's still a little irritating (and embarrassing, because I always feel like an idiot when I have to take sick time after just taking a bunch of vacation).
And since our little family is still on the mend, we didn't make it to church today. Sick-at-home father + five-month-pregnant mother + rambunctious two-year-old who refuses to sit still ≠ a reverent sacrament meeting. But while we were busily convalescing, I discovered a wonderful fact: My four-year-old son is a Tetris genius. You know, for a four-year-old. One of his favorite puzzle games on the PS3 has reverted to trial mode, and since the five available puzzles on there only keep him busy for fifteen minutes or so, I fired up the Wii and let him try his hand at Tetris Party. Until today, I had no idea there was a beginner mode, but as soon as it was up and running, Little Leavitt was dropping blocks and clearing lines like nobody's business. Caveat: Beginner mode uses simplified tetrominoes (yes, that's what the Tetris blocks are actually called) and the playing field is narrower. But still, he was getting upwards of 60 and 70 lines after only ten or fifteen minutes of playing. The kid's spatial orientation skills are going to be off the chart in no time. (Note: These are the ravings of a proud father. While the events discussed did occur as presented, any analysis of those events is subject to "MY KID IS AWESOME!" syndrome. You have been warned.)
The extra downtime today also gave me a chance to realize just how addicted I am to stories. I was looking through my Steam game library (which is embarrassingly full of games I haven't touched; stupid Humble Indie Bundles) and realizing that most of the games that I've actually sat down and played my way through are the ones with a halfway decent story to them. I think I've put upwards of twenty or thirty hours into the Diablo-clone Torchlight, across multiple characters, but I always veer away from it after reaching about level fifteen or twenty. While I enjoy the art style and the interesting tweaks they've made to the hack-n-slash dungeon crawler genre, the narrative just falls flat. There's only so much sustained interest I can muster when a game devolves into just a loot grind. I'm finding some of the same flaws in Borderlands, though I'll admit that I haven't given that game as much time or attention as I ought to. But games like Half-Life, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Mass Effect 1 and 2 wrapped me up in the narrative and kept me plugging away at the games. I've come to realize that although a game may attain the pinnacle of visual effects and have gameplay mechanics above and beyond anything the world has ever seen, if it doesn't work them into a compelling story, I might as well keep my money. Unless the game is on a ridiculous sale, but that's another post (and neurosis) in and of itself.
And it's not just in video games that I've noticed this preference for strong writing. There are very few books I can read more than once, but the ones I do all have grab-you-by-the-throat writing styles. The first book that comes to mind is Brandon Sanderson's Elantris. I don't know how many times I've read that book now, but whenever I pick it up, I have a very hard time putting it down. And don't even get me started on Firefly. I may end up melting my discs for that show from overwatching.
I'm not exactly sure where this particular addiction came from, and it's one I'm not sure I'll ever want to get rid of. A friend of mine recently posted on Facebook that fiction was imparting truth by telling lies, and I have to admit that I agree with the definition. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, and at least for me, those things are explored through fiction.
So, hello. My name is Locke, and I'm a story junkie.
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