Delete, Delete, Delete

Sometime while I was in Uruguay I got addicted to playing The Sims Social on Facebook.  Before that, it was Gardens of Time.  Before that, I played Plants V. Zombies on my phone.  This trend can be traced back in an almost unbroken stream that includes Snood and Collapse pretty much alllll through Centenary until we got the Wii, and on back through Jill of the Jungle, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, Wolfenstein, Rooms of Doom, and about a million other DOS games that I could play for HOURS on end without stopping. I think I played Klondike so much during my year off between high school and college that it's amazing everything didn't appear to float before my eyes on a green felt background.

Most of the time I don't feel like all that time I wasted really put too much of a dent in my life. I haven't developed any weird deformities at least, and I have to edit my resume down to one page instead of up.

But holy crap, it's sort of time for the madness to stop.

Today I deleted The Sims off my Facebook account, and the sure sign that it was definitely time to blow that sucker up: I felt a little pang of physical pain when I clicked "delete." Because the games on Facebook are designed to be more addictive than crack cocaine and reality television combined, my addled brain actually thought for just one moment, "I'm erasing all my hard work!!"

Bitch, please.

Unlike solitaire and Wolfenstein, which you could play in an infinite loop and never asked anything of you, the new games are exactly like what I imagine your corner pusher is like. A little flashier, a little more street wise, and WAY more withholding. You can't play The Sims or Bejeweled or what-have-you on an infinite loop until your brain melts and you feel better and then go about your life again. Instead, they give you a little taste, (Here, have 15 "energy" or "coins" or whatever) and when that runs out, in order to even make the game minimally functional, you have to either,

a) wait around for the game to "recharge"
b) pay actual legal tender for fake, non-legit "gold" or "bux"
c) beg your friends like a pathetic asshole for more "life juice" to get your fix or parts to build your spaceship, etc.

AWFUL.

If I wanted to play games and feel bad about it, I'd go to one of the three arcades left in the United States and beg unsupervised teenagers for quarters.

Anyway, I have a wedding to plan and a novel to write and like, anything else on earth to do. I'm not gonna lie; I miss it already. I had finally saved up enough "Simoleons" in-game to buy a grand piano for my Sim, which took me about a week of hardcore unemployed time-wasting.  And the fact that I even dedicated more than 25 seconds thinking about that--more time than I've spent practicing my ukulele, for sure--is why it totally had to end.