Earlier today, after I'm guessing between 500 and 1,000 hours of gameplay (I'm neither joking nor exaggerating), I finally won my first game of Game.
I have mentioned Game here a few times, but never really spoken in any detail about it. But one of the first zero drafts I wrote in the days immediately following the winter solstice of 2014, when I came back to writing after my grief- and hardship-induced hiatus, was about my impressions of Game back then. I'd been playing for a few months at that point and was genuinely obsessed. It's now a bit more than three years later, and that obsession has barely abated. I think it's time to resurrect that zero draft and turn it into a piece.
And how did this win feel, after all these years of effort? Honestly, I felt a genuine and deep-seated sense of accomplishment, the feeling of having set a goal and then investing the time to see it through. This is, admittedly, a ridiculous feeling to attach to a computer game, but there it is.
Victory, baby! Sweet, sweet victory!