There was a stretch when I thought I'd turned lazy.
That was a few years ago.
I'd sit down at work to do a technical analysis, the kind that needs your whole head, and five minutes later I was doing something else.
Email. A dashboard. Half a news story. That thing you can't forget to do. You pick up your phone and that two-second nothing leads to another, and another, and another thing you can't forget to do.
By the end of the day I hadn't stopped moving and I hadn't done a single thing that mattered.
Procrastinating, I called it. That's what everybody calls it.
But I figured out it wasn't that. Everything I looked at, even for two seconds, stayed inside. And every few minutes my head went back to it on its own.
The message I had to send. My fantasy football lineup. Any other bit of crap. They're threads that open up in your brain and don't close when you walk away.
When it finally came time for something that didn't pay me back right away, something you had to stay inside for a while, there was no room left.
Error! System.OutOfMemoryException.
It wasn't laziness. I was filling my RAM with junk that could have waited.
Very smart people design those two seconds so they're never just two. But the finger opening the app was mine.
It took a while, but I fixed it at work. Mostly.
And one day, with all that working, it happened with the controller.
That night I cleaned up the kitchen with a video on managing a team playing in the background, because I had to "make the most" of the time. And to find the right video, I sat through fifteen others along the way.
The girls asleep. Controller in hand. My hour, the one I'd been waiting for all day.
And I couldn't have been less in the mood.
Twenty minutes with my head somewhere else. Checked my phone a couple of times without noticing. Switched games twice, and everything felt slow, flat, a waste of time.
I turned it off thinking the usual. That I didn't enjoy it like I used to. That maybe this whole video game thing just wasn't for me anymore.
And then I saw it. It was the office scene, with the couch instead of the chair.
I hadn't gotten too old to play. I was showing up to my hour with my head already spent, the same way I showed up to the hard tasks on bad days.
If you've been suspecting for a while that games "just aren't for you anymore," in chapter 3 of my book I explain why the problem starts long before you pick up the controller:
For when…
…you want to glide around for a while and think about nothing: Sword of the Sea. You surf on a sword across dunes that used to be ocean, without a single line of dialogue.
You can pause whenever you want. It only saves when you finish a level, so if you quit halfway you replay that level, but they're short and you lose very little. Leave it for weeks and there's nothing to remember: you hop on the sword and go.
Not for you if you want more than pretty movement: the puzzles are simple and they repeat. It's on PS5 and PC.
Sword of the Sea is one of those games that doesn't shout. If some night it feels like nothing's happening, maybe it isn't the game. And if you want to sit down and be in it after five minutes, not twenty, chapter 3 is about exactly that:
P.S. Tell me the last thing you look at before you pick up the controller. I read every reply.