Good Game, Play Again
The orange button at the bottom of the screen says "Play Again." It’s three-thirty in the morning. I click it before I’ve finished reading the question.
I’ve bored of everything I’ve ever started, usually within a couple of hours. Films abandoned in the second act. Projects that felt urgent at noon become dead weight by midnight. Relationships—same pattern, honestly, if I’m being thorough about it. Games especially. I loaded The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and walked away before the tutorial finished. I turned off Dead Space in the second room. I don’t need to tell you about EVE Online.
What I’ve been chasing, ever since finishing the Mass Effect trilogy, is that specific sensation—the one where a fictional world hooks into your nervous system and refuses to let go. Where you can’t sleep because you’re still inside it. Where the characters feel like obligations and the story feels like something you actually owe it to yourself to finish. Mass Effect gave me that. I don’t know what else will.
So it means something—nothing flattering—that my temporary substitute is League of Legends. By any reasonable measure, a nearly completely stupid game: ten players split into two teams, beating each other senseless in an enchanted forest, again and again and again, indefinitely. No story. No character arcs. No universe to save. Just the same patch of woods and the same button combinations, and somewhere on the other side of the matchmaking algorithm, teenagers who think they invented aggression.
And yet. I’ve spent the last several nights playing Riven—a broadsword-wielding exile with a broken weapon and a permanent grudge—against whoever the queue decides I deserve. A few beers in, the Rocket Beans guys on YouTube in my ears keeping me from complete dissociation, and I am genuinely, embarrassingly good. I yell out loud when someone catches me on the last step of a chase. I feel actual joy—not the performed kind, the involuntary kind—when the "Victory" screen appears.
I’ve written about League of Legends before, and my reason for writing about things isn’t always that I like or dislike them. Sometimes it’s surgery—put the thing into words, drain the pressure, make room for whatever comes next. Writing as purge. Writing as exorcism. It usually works. This time it isn’t working.
Maybe I’ve finally found something that holds my attention past the two-and-a-half-hour wall. Maybe I just hate losing to teenagers. Probably both. "Good game," someone types in the chat. My level ticks up. A notification tells me an ally honored me for bravery, an enemy for respect. The button is still there, still orange, still asking. It’s almost four. I’ve already decided.