Feeding the Beast

This was supposed to be a post about Magic: the Gathering, because I bought a pack earlier this month and wanted to start playing at a local gaming store. But I didn’t make it out there last week because I started something else new. I started playing Feed the Beast a great set of Minecraft mods, and I learned something dangerous about starting new things.

I’ve written about Minecraft before, and love it. It’s so much fun, and if it’s a game with a lot to teach me, Feed the Beast is its bigger, more complex brother. I’m learning about design, about resource and energy management, cooperating with my friends who play, and about myself. It adds a ton of new technology, from solar panels to jetpacks to giant lava tanks. There’s a lot of toys to play with and projects to do. I highly recommend it.

I started playing last week, and that was basically all I did last week. I didn’t do enough writing, I barely responded to emails, and I’ve still got a bunch of pending things to catch up on all because I was feeding the beast. The part of me that hungers for new things and that gets absorbed by their newness, sucked in to the exclusion of all other things. I barely managed to do laundry, because I’d say “Just after I finish this project” or “As soon as this ore is done processing.”

But it’s not just Minecraft, or even playing too many games. It’s the danger of newness. We get sucked into all kinds of new things. New tv shows, new jobs, new people in our lives, and we can lose sight of the value of the things we already had. There’s a tendency to rearrange time, arranging some of the old responsibilities, relationships, and activities around the new thing rather than arranging the newness around the old. Sometimes that can be good. Shedding a structure, habit, or person in your life can be good for you depending on the context. But that should be something you choose. What I encountered this past week was old things shoved aside by the beast of newness in order to get at fresh, delicious experiences. To me, that’s worse than useless, because it disrespects my relationships and responsibilities.

I want to have space for new things. I think we all do. I’m busy, but I try hard to keep space for new activities, ideas, and people to come along. But especially with habits, I need to control that space. The time where I get to play videogames every night of the week has passed, and so has the one where I go home, lock my door, and write all night. I didn’t realize how tenuous this control can be, but Feed the Beast taught me that. I’m still going to play, I love the game (and my house is coming along incredibly), but I’m going into it with a new awareness of how I spend my time there and how that affects the rest of my life.

It’s really funny to me to talk about playing a game like binge drinking, but that’s definitely what it was, and I had a lot of fun. The real lesson I’ve learned? Get ahead on things so I have more time for binge gaming. What’s something new that you got too caught up in, and how did you get out of it?