what i learned about myself after playing the most perfectly balanced game of all time for five days straight
When I was recovering from bottom surgery, I really missed streaming on Twitch a lot. For weeks, I did nothing but lie down in bed essentially all day, in pain, absolutely bored out of my mind, wishing that I could be productive again or do another stream again. After several weeks, I could finally tolerate the pain from just sitting down for about 2 hours. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to finally start streaming again. I decided to slowly ease back into it by playing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind every day.
As you might know, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is the most perfectly balanced game of all time (/j). So, each day I spent playing the game I:
- Encountered monsters that could steamroll my health
- Cursed whenever I lost 30 minutes of progress because I didn’t make a save
- Cursed whenever I lost the same 30 minutes of progress again because I didn’t make a save
- Found ways to take all of a merchants money with useless goods
It was a fun time, but something I noticed when I came back to the game every day was that it was so much easier to remember what I was doing. Even though I only played for two hours each day, I felt more engaged because I started spending small, idle moments of my day thinking about what I wanted to do next.
You see, I do game development streams on Twitch and I had always found it difficult to keep up with it. I only streamed it about once or twice a week at most, but I would always try to stream for as long as I could so I could really get into what I was working on. It always felt hard to get back into game development every week because I had to remember what I was doing and what I wanted to do next. I felt like I had to context switch.
I realized after playing the most perfectly balanced game of all time that I needed to reduce the amount of context switching in my life. Instead of hopping from one game development stream to one music production stream every week, I should instead focus on just one for multiple days in a row until I’m done with whatever it is I’m working on.
So, I did just that. Now, I just stream game development as often as I can in consecutive days even if the streams themselves are less than two hours long. I’ve found myself feeling more productive and energized about the things I’m working on. Instead of 3 projects inching along with incremental progress every week, I’m making a larger amount of progress on just one project. I’m hitting more satisfying points in the development process in a matter of a week or two instead of after a few months.
So, in summary, I rate Morrowind a ribbit out of 10. It’s the most perfectly balanced game that also teaches you how to be a frog because frogs have the fastest movement tech. Thanks for listening to my TED talk.
