Changing My Focus, Saving My Hands, Playing More Games

It seems like a cycle. I’m sure it’s a cycle. But it’s one of those things that takes so long – like watching a plant grow – you lose interest in the creeping slowness of it and don’t realize that it’s all coming around again, over and over.

That’s my hands. My work ethic I suppose you’d call it. I love writing about games and reading up on the industry’s change, but I also love to play games, and possibly even more important to me is the ability to use my hands. So you can see how all these interests and concerns tug at one another, a Venn diagram that’s constantly shifting its “data” in my consciousness.

I realize now that it’s been about a year since the last time this happened. I get so caught up in writing, in trying to keep the site alive, providing daily content that I slowly stop playing games and focus on the news, the press releases, the new game announcements. All that typing takes it toll on my hands, the left one mostly, and things start to go downhill.

Numbness, aching. It throbs through me when I’m typing, holding a controller, even sleeping. It’s depressing too, all the things I wish I could do, the stories I could write, the little features to constantly edit and update, the games to play. But I can’t. I suddenly find myself cleaning the apartment for lack of anything less hand-intensive to do. Doing the dishes. Vacuuming. I wish Nintendo could offer up a way to attach your Wii Remote to the vacuum and turn real life chores into a game, then maybe I wouldn’t feel so un-gamer-y.

I hate to be so grim about it but maybe this helps explain a bit better than in years past why I’ve decided to take a step back from GameLuv for a while. I’m not stopping, not at all. I’ve got a huge list of features I want to work on and, for a change, I’m going to work at them instead of banging them out and throwing them online as quickly as possible.

Think of it as the quantity vs. quality thing. As much as I’d love to be here every day commenting and complaining about the day’s news in little blog-y spurts, I’m going to try the more journalistic approach and actually revise and edit and pare down, unlike this increasingly bloated post. I’ve also got video features to do like ReGaming My Past that I’m excited to work on because they require little dexterous hand work. The editing takes longer than if I’d just typed it out but my hands, the left especially, appreciate the change in format.

I’ll keep the Name of the Game and RantPost features going weekly and I’m sure some crazy Japanese games will force my hand back to the keyboard from time to time, but I just can’t keep doing this day to day right now. Surely that creeping cycle will continue to churn unnoticed through the months ahead and one day I’ll wake with a feeling of nothingness in my hands, no aches or pains, and I’ll start posting like mad again. When this far-off day comes, just be sure to remind me to take it easy so this whole thing doesn’t happen again in a year.