COD DOA (Premium)

When I first started down the path towards my writing career, my mentor Gary Brent told me about his strategy for being productive: He would reward himself for completing some milestone---a project for a class he was teaching, perhaps, or a chapter or section of a book---by playing videogames. It was a simple system: Get some writing done, play videogames for a little while.

This first came up while we were working on an update to a Microsoft Excel book that he had written for the education market. Strictly speaking, the first book we worked on together was about Visual Basic 3, and that was my entry into writing as a potential career. But he had previously written the Excel book alone and the publisher needed an update for whatever the then-most-recent version was. And so we worked on that together as well, with me in a decidedly minor role.

That book didn’t resonate very much with me, but I was happy to work with Gary, and I have a very specific memory of the discussion we had about his work/reward system: He would play through individual levels of the Id Software game Wolfenstein 3D each time he completed a chapter. In those pre-Internet days, that meant that finding all of the secrets---each level had some number of secret areas full of additional health and treasure, and in some cases access to secret levels---was a lot more difficult than it would be today.

As a lifelong gamer, this appealed to me. Plus, videogames evolved very quickly in the early 1990s as sideway-scrollers like Jill of the Jungle and the early Duke Nukem titles gave way to the 3D games pioneered by John Carmack and Id. By the time Gary told me about his system, Wolf 3D had been replaced by DOOM, and even more impressive games like Duke Nukem 3D (from 3D Realms) and Quake were just a year away.

This sounds obvious, but given my recent experiences with the latest Call of Duty game, I feel like I need to spell it out: The reason Gary’s system made sense is that it rewarded work with fun. Games could be---can still be---challenging, of course, but they’re inherently fun.

Of course, there’s a fine line between challenging and fun.

This reminds me of the theory my wife and I have about international travel, in that there are different degrees of difficulty in traveling outside the United States. For example, Canada is the easiest because it’s very, very similar, and most people speak the same language. The easiest places to travel in Europe are the UK and Ireland, because of the shared languages. The most difficult places to travel, overall, are probably in Asia, where the languages and customs can be so different from what we’re used to. And so on.

The sweet spot, for us, is western Europe, countries like France, Spain, Italy, and the like, where there is a degree of difficulty, mostly from a language perspective, that is, for us, surmountable. That’s what makes it fun to visit these places: They’re the right combination of being dif...