Happiness is...Breadth or Depth?

It seems I have turned into quite the dabbler this holiday season.

I can't quite seem to settle down into any one game and play it in an extreme hardcore fashion until I get to the end. It's been an hour here, two hours there, maybe 8 hours in game A for a while, another few in game B, before puttering around again.

It's leaving me feeling both satisfied and discontent.

I like the variety. There are so many games out there, no one game is the ultimate all-encompassing monster, the beliefs of WoW fanatics not withstanding. Trying them out allows me to sample them while making sure my graphics card expenditure is not wasted, and I just like knowing a little bit about everything.

I can't help but feel a little envious about those who dig deep and straight down into a game's innards and basically play the heck out of one before moving on to the next soon-to-be-in-the-discard-pile. I wonder about the sense of achievement they get. Is the buzz better or more relieving?

This restlessness is caused, in part, by me hitting roadbumps along the way in my chosen games to play deep. They're not seriously impassible roadblocks. They're just little niggling irritations that raise the activation energy high enough that I'm reluctant to do them, or force me to wait, etc.

Fer example, my Marauder is level 35 in Warhammer, having literally ground my way past the last two or three levels in an attempt to make myself eligible for city siege attendance. Then I find that the server stability is still prohibiting any serious mass zerging of any fortress, and victory point contesting is quite agonizing at times if there's not enough opposition. Again, it's not impossible, I hear they took the Empire fortress lord yesterday, when I wasn't logged on. But it now seems like I may as well wait until the fates align and I see one, rather than working hard for it.

My mad grind has also resulted in bagfuls of clogged inventory. Though I have recently graduated from the school of Selling Vendor Trash Without Guilt, I have thus far obtained failing grades from the university of Selling Useful Crafting Items Without Using Them or Destroying Potential Tome Unlock Items. No doubt I have enough materials to raise my apothecary skills, except that I'm missing one crucial ingredient, potion stabilizers. To get those, I will have to devote some time to slaying wolves mindlessly.

Contemplating the state of my clogged inventory makes me reluctant to log on until I'm ready for the zen of wolf-slaying. So Warhammer falls out of the option list for a bit.

There's ATITD. My new pet grind of interest. I like my new relaxed attitude to taking the grind slow, while listening in to the region chatter and letting the hardcore fanatics unlock stuff for everyone. I just now have a waiting problem on my hands.

I'd like to pay for one or two months of ATITD. But I'm just not at all secure with typing my credit card number into the client, letting it be stored by the small one or two or three-man company of eGenesis, and potentially hacked by any random dude bored enough to look in ATITD's way.

Are there any payment alternatives? Well, the website mentioned Paybycash. So I go check that up. And Paybycash doesn't have ATITD listed there anymore. Blah.

So now I'm stuck with about three options. Option 1: Contact the devs, and ask if there's an alternate way to pay. There's Paypal. All I need is a valid email address and I will cheerfully forward about 2-3 months' worth of subscription to you. I place a billing call and though there are 0 people in the queue ahead of me, I'm still waiting. I suppose 9pm on a Sunday night in EST means no real hope of an answer in a tiny company. I'll have to wait until working hours and see.

Option 2: I could open a teeny tiny bank account, get a debit card for it and just put in a couple hundred for online purchases. Then see if the debit card number is acceptable. This would involve far too much backend work on my part though, and it may just be easier to overcome the addiction to repetition out of sheer laziness.

And of course Option 3: I could just say screw it, this is way too much work for something meant to be a game, and leave my trial account to rot.

Option 3 is open and quite attractive if I should fail miserably with Option 1. It depends on how dearly they want my money and the quality of service offered me, I suppose.

My backup drug of choice is Fallout 3 for now.

I'm enjoying it greatly. It blends some of the better elements of Oblivion (FPS perspective, 3D game environment with great graphics) with a bit of Mass Effect character inspiration and dialogue choice and incorporates some important soul elements of Fallout (the lore, SPECIAL, perks, VATS for a turn-based flavor.)

I'm having fun roleplaying/immersing in it. Perhaps it's the choice of character, but I fit in the gameworld really well.

It just has an IRRITATING habit of crashing to desktop at important junctures, or killing me off when I forgot to save for the past hour and the last autosave wasn't far from that point either.

So after about 2-3 hours of really enjoyable immersive game, I'm suddenly flung out to my nice scenic desktop facing the prospect of replaying a certain expanse of area, depending on the last time I saved.

Can we say activation energy = very high? Propsect of start game again != appealing.

And maybe I should just go lie on the bed and sulk instead.