I played a bunch of Ultratron over the past couple of weeks. It’s beautiful pulsing dance of bullets that lost its charm somewhere past level 100 where I thought I had the game beat, but everything keeps on repeating ever faster. That was eleven hours of obsessive pleasure (according to Steam) followed by emptiness.
Something that does give me a lot of meaning recently but which you probably cannot call a game are my Moves stats. Definitions are not important and neither are buzzwords. Moves hits the ‘quantified self’ buzzword and foregoes the ‘gamification’ one but still numbers and feedback are key to the experience. Its prescriptive restraint is tasteful and it tracks all the bike rides I could not be bothered with. Automatic and good enough turns out to be near perfect.
I’ll be looking for more meaningful ways to play games in my day to day life in the near future but for now there’s more work than play in my life. With the Berlin summer upon us, if I play anything, I’ll be looking to do it outside. I’ve been meaning to learn cricket, but I’m open to other suggestions too.