Drifting

As one of Nathan W. Pyle’s Strange Plant beings said recently, “I don’t know how to use my life.” I’m at one of those landmark life ages where there’s a strong desire to either enter hermitage or develop a problematic relationship with alcohol and run off with a 19-year old.

As the current economic climate renders alcoholism prohibitively expensive, and 19-year olds are currently a greater-than-usual risk to life and limb thanks to the coronavirus, it seems the hermitage option is probably the safest bet for the time being. As I have sufficient computer kit to run the games I want to, this shouldn’t be an issue, but I’m struggling to settle to anything at the moment. I have no goal, no aim.

Humans are games-playing creatures. We’re good at self-defining (often pointless) goals and (arbitrary) rules to achieve them. One can assume from this setup that what we’re after is the experience of playing the game, not attainment of the goal. So it’s ironic that without a goal (however pointless) there seems to be no point playing the game. This is where I find myself at the moment. I’ve tried a number of goals and rulesets for size, and nothing fits – I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s playing the game that doesn’t interest me. To use an old expression, “the game isn’t worth the candle”.

I don’t think this is depression; I’ve had depression in the past and this doesn’t feel like it. Someone said, “we don’t stop playing when we get old, we get old because we stop playing.” Maybe I’m just too old.

Not joking about the procrastination

2 years, eh? I refer any readers to the dictionary definitions (I know you kids hate ’em) for “regular” as opposed to “frequent”.

Another day, another blog I’d forgotten entirely about. However. Due to a long-fought-against transfer of my main computing from Windows 7 to Windows 10, I’m now struggling to get old favourites up and running on Microsoft’s latest hellware. Thank the gods for GOG, that’s all I can say.

I last had a play with Cyberlife’s (later GameWare’s) Creatures about 5 years ago. It seems I used the GOG version on that occasion and set up a new world. Creatures, for anyone who doesn’t remember (or wasn’t alive at the time) was the first significant artificial life sim (not, you notice, artificial intelligence – but life, based on digital DNA). The original game came out in the mid-90s, and there’s still something of a community going. C2 was a dismal disappointment – it ramped up the complexity but killed the playability in the process – and I’d lost interest by the time C3 and Docking Station came around, although I got into those some years later. C4 never materialised and, as far as I’m aware, the franchise has now been abandoned apart from some sterling open source work in the community. User-created add-ons have always been a strong factor of these games from the word go.

I’ve obviously played original Creatures enough over the years that I can remember all the pitfalls of setting it up, but I’ll have to track down the required files required to offset the initial niggles, and check which of those are required by GOG (their Albian Years version comes with 1.0.4 as standard but I doubt there are other, user-created patches installed). When I’ve got that sorted out – I’m sure I’ve written it all down before – I’ll do another post so I’ve got a record somewhere. At some point I might even do the same for C3/DS, but I seem to remember that was an absolute sod to set up, even on Windows 7, so we’ll have to see. In all honesty, I’m likely to lose interest or memory of the entire blog before that happens.