Yeah, so I do this thing. Every time we get started on some new online game, I go completely stats hungry on it. Its just what I do. I’m a numbers freak. Games with more complexity in their stats and character information aren’t confusing or a ‘put off’, instead they appeal to me.

I was thinking about this with someone else online the other day, and she pointed out that in some cases, some people (I don’t think I go quitethis far, by the way) can’t even enjoy a thing unless they do go to that level with it. The example cited was the difference between someone who races RC cars around on a dirt track, compared to the person who assembles the cars from their component atoms, from scratch. In fact, she went so far as to say that in some extreme cases, its not even the racing anymore that does it for them, its the path to get the car there. How it actually performs at that point is almost secondary.

You can extrapolate this principle, I believe, to just about any ‘liesure’ activity at all. Fishing (drifting lazily on a lake vs. meticulously tying your own flies), playing games, blogging (sure, why not?), and even reading. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to fill in the extremes on both ends for each activity mentioned above, and coming up with your own examples.

Now, the remaining question is the one aching in my mind right now…. is it only a certain obsessive personality type that requires that kind of complete dissection of an activity to have fun with it? If so, is it possible to infer other things about people based on how deeply they go into things like this? And perhaps a bit more mental introspection for myself to make sure I’m still having fun with the things I take to the depths that I do.

For the record, I don’t consider myself as deep into these things as some of the above examples, or ones even more extreme that I can imagine. But I freely admit I take things beyond where many might go with them. I think this is just part of the mindset that got me where I am now. Geeks, in general, have certain affinities for obsessive/compulsive behavior and the like. I accepted this long ago about myself, and have just learned (I hope) to ride the wave when it strikes me.

Its all about having fun. FUN.

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