I’ve been coming to terms with a lot of things about myself lately. I’ve realized that I’m not a very talented songwriter/lyricist. I’m not all that good at web design. Web development, yes; design, not so much. I’m not really cut out for running my own business, yet. I have psychological problems that require medication; I’m not going to be able to fix them on my own.
In the midst of these massive, life-changing revelations, I’ve come to accept one thing: I am a gamer. I have a kick-ass computer (that’s starting to show it’s age, but is still kick-ass), that I tried to justify buying based on “real” things I wanted to do with it, like web development and video editing.
Now, granted, I do want to do those, and I do use it for video editing. But under all of that was a desire to have it run games. I’m no longer in denial of this fact. I no longer feel guilty every time I buy a game. I no longer feel guilty when I play a game. It’s very liberating.
I don’t really know where this guilt came from. I always just had this (totally unfounded) notion that Lara was against games, and that if I played them she’d get mad at me. In reality, that was patently untrue, and in her defense, Lara had never done ANYTHING to give me that impression: it was, as near as I can figure, a notion constructed in my own warped mind, using materials generated by my own self-loathing.
This comes up because one of my bosses at work just upgraded his graphics card in his computer (he got a GeForce 8800GTX, the lucky bastard), and he gave me his “old” 7800GTX. The card he gave me is a ridiculous upgrade from the two 6600GT’s (SLI) that I had, and the difference in gameplay is enormous. I’d never seen games look this good. So I’m currently installing all the games I have, if for no other reason that I want to see how great they can look!
If you’re curious, here are the games (PC only; we have a Wii, but that’s another blog post) that I own, have installed, and am installing:
As a source of endless frustration, I bought SimCity 4, and I have the manual in front of me, but for the life of me I can’t find the disks for it. I’ve been looking for a month…
So anyway, to sum it all up, I like games. And now, I’m ok with it.