Video games are my personal creative kryptonite

It is no secret that I love video games...a lot...probably too much...okay, certainly far too much. Video games are wonderful things that I could spend a series of blog posts praising, but that isn't what I wanted to talk about today. In addition to enjoying video games, I like to spend a good portion of my spare time doing creative things such as drawing, writing, animating and things of that nature. In the past couple of months I have come to a very saddening realization, playing games in moderate to excess sessions (and I tend to do so in excess) leads to, writers block, and a general disinterest in doing things of a creative variety, at least that's how it is for me. The weird thing though is that this doesn't tend to be the case for other forms of entertainment, in fact, it's usually the opposite. I went through a period in the last month or so in which I almost exclusively spent my free time consuming books and films with little to no video games being played. I noticed my appetite for writing came back to me, and toward the end, the same thing occurred with my drawing.


I started back to school this week and while I mostly have "fun" classes this quarter (if you consider history and mythology fun), they do require a lot of academic reading, as such, my personal reading has taken a bit of a dive as well as my desire to commit to watching feature films on the scale that I had been (I was doing about one a day over the course of a month). Instead, I have been sucked back into IV breeding Pokemon which I am starting to have a love hate relationship with. On the one hand it feels really good to build up a collection of competitively viable Pokemon that I can play other people with in person and not just on some simulator. Then again, even with all of the improvements gen 6 has sent our way it's still SUCH a time sink that I almost feel as though I'm wasting my time grinding for hours. While I do this I tend to watch Youtube videos (mostly Game Grumps) which again are a lot of fun and definitely have their merits, however I'm getting to the point where I'm feeling over saturated with that as well.

Of course I could never cut video games and Youtube videos out of my life completely and I would never want to, not even close. But I do think it's time that I seriously thought about cutting back on my play time as it tends to take away from things that I enjoy as well and a little balance in life is a good thing. I'm also not saying that I can never binge game again, I'm sure I will numerous times. Specifically when Smash Bros. 4 comes out, I know myself too well, but over all it seems like a good idea to start slowing things down a little on that front and to start pursuing my other interests with a little more effort.