🔒 What This Videogame Says About My Creative Slump

A few weeks ago, during some idle procrastination, I browsed through my Steam library and opened up a game that I’d actually purchased like a year ago but never got around to trying out.

 I’m not much of a gamer at all, although I played them when I was a kid. My favorite games were the Sonic the Hedgehog series, which I followed loyally from the character’s 16-Bit Genesis era until he joined the world of 3D platformers in the 128-Bit era.

 By the way, can you believe that was only seven years? At the speed we perceive time in our youth, my Sonic fandom felt like it encompassed 20 years of my life, when in reality the golden age of Sonic the Hedgehog lasted fewer years than Clinton was president, which he was for almost the entirety of it.

I never thought about that because I didn’t really know or care who the American president was. One of my clear early childhood memories was playing Sonic and asking my mother who the President of the United States was, and she had to think about it for a moment before saying “I think it’s George Bush.” That was 1991 or 92, and I was 7 or 8, and the only reason I know that is because those were the only years when Bush the Senior overlapped with the existence of Sonic the Hedgehog.

 Sonic games, weirdly, are too hard for me now. I don’t know how I clocked them when I was a kid. The games I enjoy now are not platformers but things like management sims and what are called automation games. The game I picked up a few weeks ago is called Satisfactory. Basically, you land on an alien planet and start mining resources until you can build yourself a factory that manufactures doodads. You deliver them to your base and are rewarded with recipes for more complex doodads, which you make by building up your factory. That’s it, that’s the game.

But it’s become a bit of a problem, you see. At some point I kind of designated Saturday my “do nothing productive” day. My secular Sabbath. Apart from my capital-J Job, I spend most of my off time writing or working on my Three Minute Philosophy animation series. I publish my weekly newsletter on Friday, very late at night sometimes, and then Saturday I just kind of scroll the internet or play a videogame, mostly.

 After I got the hang of Satisfactory I didn’t put it down on Sunday and get right back to work. Satisfactory ate Sunday as well, and then on Monday when I clocked into my day job, I started thinking about my factory. When I got home I checked on my factory and did a little work on it and before I knew it, my factory had eaten Monday. That sorta went on.

 So I’ve been temporarily distracted by things before, I kind of have that sort of personality, but this is something new, it’s a five- or six-week distraction that doesn’t seem to be getting off my back, and in case you’re wondering, yes, I am thinking about my factory right now.

While I want to reassure subscribers that I haven’t done no work, on either my book or my newsletter projects, over the past month, the work has hit a speedbump. This chapter of my book is kicking my ass. The philosophy video I’m working on is kicking my ass (coming this weekend, hopefully, I’m doing my damndest). I haven’t missed a deadline for Plato Was a Dick, but it’s also kicking my ass. None of this is any more difficult than it was before, but my wife and I went away on vacation in September and in my head I never really came back from it, not fully.

 In my effort to reckon with this I think I now understand what’s happened, and I understand why, specifically, this game has broken my brain.

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