Good Morning Friends! Sometimes in my life, I fall into a virtuous pattern in life that makes me immensely happy. I am still deeply engaged in Path of Exile, but it is more than just that. Since coming back from the holiday break I have been spending my evenings futzing around in Delve while listening to an Audiobook. So many of the games that I play are mechanically enjoyable but not necessarily narratively engaging. So it has long been my habit to be doing two things at the same time. Often this is listening to a YouTube video, specifically a long-form pseudo-documentary but more recently it has been consuming books. I talked awhile back about the Libby App, and granting me easy access to digital books and in my specific case a trove of audiobooks.
Since starting this new trend I’ve consumed three books and am nearing the end of the fourth. So much of me wants to say “read” because that is normally how you talk about a book. I don’t have a great vernacular for audiobooks because “listening” to a book seems not quite right for the process. Essentially my focus is entirely on the book that is playing out in a wonderful radio play style audio drama, and the game itself is just something I am also doing with my time. Not listed above is Skin Game also in the Harry Dresden series, which I had purchased when it came out and had laying around. I never got around to catching up and am doing so now. I’ve got holds in place for the next Dresden novel Battleground as well as one for Nona the Ninth the next book in the Locked Tomb series. I am uncertain which one of those will land first but whatever the case I think I am enjoying this process I am engaged in.
I was talking about this last night over on Mastodon/Fediverse and my friend Victor chimed in that he did not understand how I could do this. I don’t necessarily understand either to be truthful. I’ve never really been able to do just one thing at a time. If I am watching television I am also playing a game on my laptop. If I am reading, I am also listening to music or something of the sort. Part of why I hate going to the theater is that I feel like I need to be doing something else while watching the Movie. It is like I need to be doing one thing that has my focus, and another thing that is consuming all of my fidgety energies. Even if it is just running around in circles, that second activity is almost always going to be a game. As a result the games that I play the most, tend to be the games that are most mechanically focused and less focused on narrative and story. Sure I will go on a kick of playing a bunch of narrative games in a row, but my more common happy place is to be playing a game that I have shifted to muscle memory while doing something else with my greater focus.
My happy place of late has been Delve, which is a game mode within Path of Exile where you go diving down tunnels looking for treasure as you move from node to node on an underground map. Last night I found this amazing cluster of cities including three boss nodes, two of which I completed before running out of sulfite. Instead of shifting over to my mapping/bossing character, I opted to start working on a Toxic Rain Raider which is intended to be the eventual replacement for the Trickster variant that I started a while back. In both cases though, these are things that I know extremely well and understand the patterns that I need to follow, and as such, I can shift my attention to something else like the book I was “reading”. This is unfortunately just how my brain processes data best. Growing up I used to doodle incessantly to the chagrin of my teachers… who did not understand that doodling was actually allowing me to consume the content more completely.
For me, if I am “only” listening or “only” watching… I tend to zone out and lose track of what I am doing. I get bored because I am not as engaged as I want to be. There are some activities that I can’t do at the same time. For example, if I am writing I can’t listen to anything with words… because my “word center” is having its attention split between actively writing and trying to understand the words. As a result for times when I need to focus on something that is text-based… I have a stock of orchestral soundtracks to listen to. Admittedly all of this as a side note, is why I greatly prefer “dubbed” Anime because I can’t read television at the same time I am playing a video game. I am not sure if anyone else is regularly doing two or three things at the same time, but it is the thing that works for me.