Comfort Games

I haven’t played Quake II in over a decade.

I played the heck out of the game when it first came out. I memorized the flow of it, attuned myself to its rhythms and patterns, and learned to recognize its subtle sound design cues almost on a subconscious level.

“New room? Probably a soldier hiding right around the corner. Is that sunlight through the doorway? Check the skies for lurking flying creatures; I can hear them breathing.”

(Despite my countless hours killing the Quake II aliens, I couldn’t begin to tell you their names. “Flying Barrel Thing?” “Machine Grunts?” “Stompy Railgunner?”)

Last week, I got a new desktop computer. Nothing fancy or expensive, but something good enough to run Minecraft and the Sims. On a whim, I also installed Quake II on it, just to see if the old game still held up. Within minutes, it all came back to me; it was like riding a bike made of a gun-toting space marine.

Quake II is apparently my gaming equivalent of comfort food. It’s tasty, easy to digest, and not really much of a challenge (turns out I still have a lot of the levels memorized). And that’s okay. I don’t always need challenges. Sometimes I just want to shut off the higher functions of my brain and focus on shooting aliens.

But the same way you can’t live off nothing but mashed potatoes (mmm mashed potatoes…), you need challenge in your gaming diet. The brain gets bored with a thing once you’ve mastered it, and doing the boring thing just because it’s there is how you (I) end up watching reruns of 1980s sitcoms when you (I) should just go to bed already.

I’ll play through to the end of Quake II. (I hate leaving  game unfinished.) But after that, I think my next video game will be whatever the opposite of comfort food is — an unpronounceable dish in a new ethnic restaurant, marked on the menu with indecipherable icons, perhaps.