02/28/01

Fat’s Philosophies;
A case AGAINST buying Phantasy Star Online...

As I type this, I am sitting in my workplace, a victim of the activities from the night before.  My vision is blurred, my speech is slurred, my joints are stiff, and my thoughts are clouded by a thick haze.  There is a tinge of a migraine headache around my left temple.  My eyelids feel like they have 50 pound weights taped to them...and have you ever seen your hands throb?  

I work for a sign company.  While I was busy feeling everything above, one of the secretaries from the front office has just come back and given me some corrections from a job I did this morning.  On a sign for a local medical facility, The words "and", "the", and "obstetrics/gynecology" were misspelled (I can’t believe I misspelled gynecology...).  As I reload the job, correct the botched words and re-cut the signage, I am thinking one thing...

"I just gotta lay off the PSO...."

The night before, I had played Phantasy Star Online almost from the moment I got home from work until almost dawn.  Offline, I had an epic battle with Darkfalz in Hard mode (a hint: When he sucks your soul out, run, and don’t let him hit you until your soul returns).  Later that night I played in Very Hard mode with a crew of my Game Hits colleagues.  They showed me their new enhanced weaponry, and actually made me think that I wasn’t playing the game enough, even though I have over 100 hours clocked in to this stinkin’ thing...So I Play on and on.  The clock sitting on the nearby desk goes from the double digits of Midnight to the single digits of the wee hours of late night, and on into the early, mid and almost late hours of the morning.

Studies say when you reach a certain age, you can easily live on an average of 3 hours of sleep per night.  I wonder what age that is?  Actually, I find it quite easy to do that on the weekends, when the only things I do are things that I want to...it makes me ponder as to whether or not the people who did these studies had jobs to wake up to the next day...

Well, I do, so on the mere 3 hours of rest (probably only an hour of actual REM sleep) I managed to squeeze out of the night, I bring my sorry butt into work.  The heavy bags under my eyes make it look like I made a long cameo in Fight Club, and the constant opening of my mouth due to yawning will probably eventually result in swallowing a few bugs.  If I didn’t hate coffee so much, I think I’d be calling Juan Valdez personally right now, to tell him to bring a couple of burros with sacks of coffee beans...

My co-workers, and worse, my supervisors think that I’ve been spending my recent weeknights immersing myself in heavy drinking and partying.  I wish.  Not that PSO isn’t just as fulfilling in it’s own way, but partying is more acceptable to the general public...though not necessarily to your boss...

So the work day is now passing by...slowwwly.  I can tell I’m not really in a condition to work right now, as I could have sworn a man in a large yellow hat just asked me when the artichoke choir is coming, and if they would be singing "Ave Maria" (cuss-cursin’ elevator music), right before he rode off in a bowl of bacon-bit sprinkled porridge, leaving a trail of sauerkraut (I probably should tell you that my work area is very close to the lunchroom)....I have to admit my body’s attempts at dozing can be entertaining.  My eyes close, and the whole world explodes in color and song...

Still, when I’m not having lack-of-sleep induced mirages, I can only think of one thing right now, and while it should be sleep, it isn’t....it’s going back home, turning on the VGA monitor and playing more PSO....fiendin’, as it were.

I have technically beaten the game on normal and hard both with teammates and by myself.  I have completed the offline quests, some multiple times, and have traversed through all of the game’s areas countless times, but...there’s so much more to be done.  More weapons to find, more techniques to learn, more levels to gain...I must forge on, and I refuse to cheat or steal others’ weapons, money or items to do it.

I used to pride myself on being immune to most kinds of obsession.  No longer.  As I feel my sanity and my sense of reality slowly slip away, I realize that I have become a PSO-aholic.  A large part of my day is spent figuring out speed vs. attack ratios on Gatlings and Scythes, and how to turn my Mag companion into a Sega Saturn-style nIghtopian, or the classic Sega Master System icon, Opa Opa.

A rather ironic thought also crosses my mind that if I put as much time and effort into bettering my life as I do in bettering my PSO character, I’d probably at least be ruler of the state by now.  I suppose that if this were part of my career (as it is for Pat, at least to a certain extent), that I wouldn’t let it bother me so much (hey, that’s IT! Hey Pat! Get me a job writin’ fo’ GAME MAGS!  Huh?  Whaddya MEAN my writing sucks?...I coulda been a contenda...).  I AM thankful that I don’t have any relationships going on in my life right now, as an obsession with a game like this could very potentially destroy one...

In psychologically evaluating myself, I’m finding that perhaps I don’t have the ability to keep my obsessive-compulsive behavior in check when it comes to games like PSO.  This same behavior is what separates the "casual gamers" from the "fanboys" (or "fangirls". Obsession is not gender-specific).  Some are proud of their fan-hood, and wear it like a badge (or a loud, colorful T-shirt with Anime characters all over it).  Others (like me, apparently), feel guilt and shame over it.  There needs to be a happy medium somewhere, and that’s what I’m looking for.

In a conversation last week with another Game Hits columnist, Gamer Jake, he accused me of being "anti-everything".  At first I scoffed at this notion, but now, as I read over the article I just wrote...I realize that he’s right.  While I love PSO (too much), I wrote this as a warning to those who are thinking about playing it.  It MAY take a little bit more of your time than you might want it to, but only if you let it, as I have.  Sooner or later my fiendish addiction for this game will pass, and life for me will return to normal obsessions, at least until PSO’s sequel comes out.

I apologize if this philosophy-rant isn’t as entertaining as some of my other stuff, but the guy with the yellow hat (it’s plaid now) has just come back and said that the rutabagas have decided to sing "La Bamba" instead, right before lobbing a microwave burrito into a cup of soup and riding a diet Coke into the land of leftover tuna casserole.  The only meaning I can get out of this is that I’m really, really tired.... 

-Fat

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