From the Editor’s Desk: Game (Premium)

have developed what can only be described as an unhealthy relationship with video games. Well, not with video games. With the only video game I really play, Call of Duty.

To be clear, I’m not talking about the issues I had with the past several Call of Duty (COD) titles, where COD: Modern Warfare (2019) and COD: Black Ops Cold War (2020) were both unplayable online because of lag/latency issues, or where COD: Vanguard (2021) was just a lackluster multiplayer experience, forcing me to mostly stick with the same tired and years-old game, COD: Black Ops 4 (2018), for longer than I’d wished. No, this is a bigger problem.

I’ve been playing video games for most of my life, and I am part of the first generation of people to have access to home video games from an early age. As an adult, it was reasonable to expect that my gameplaying time would decline over the years, but I also experienced the golden age of video game innovation, largely driven by John Carmack and his unprecedented string of first-person shooter successes over a decade starting with Wolfenstein 3D in 1992 and ending, for me, with DOOM 3 in 2004. No worries: by this time, Halo, Medal of Honor, COD, and other shooters had picked up the slack.

I was also taught to use video games as a reward of sorts for work accomplished: Gary Brent, the person who jumpstarted my career, used to celebrate the completion of a book chapter or whatever amount of work by winding down with some Wolfenstein 3D. And so we---and then I---continued the tradition with whatever similar game was new at the time as we wrote into the years to come. It seemed healthy enough.

And it can be: distracting your mind is a key way to use it more efficiently, which most people understand implicitly because we’ve all had that “ah-ha!” moment in the shower, while walking, while driving, or during whatever inconvenient time, have all thought of the perfect comeback later or have belatedly remembered some thing that was right there on the tip of your tongue … but wasn’t. The nice thing about gaming, for a writer like me, is that it’s right there next to where you are writing, and you can just stop playing when inspiration, memory, or whatever winks into existence. It’s not that inconvenient.

My unhealthy relationship, with COD, with the latest COD, called Modern Warfare II (MWII), thankfully isn’t about me taking time away from work or important life events. Although one could argue, pretty effectively, that any time spent gaming is taking time away from things that are always more important. I get that. But I think my output speaks for itself, whether it’s the Windows 11 book I’m publishing as I go or the writing I do for Thurrott.com. I’m writing as much as I ever have, and thanks to Grammarly and its weekly reports, I at least have the data to back that up.

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