I will use Animal Crossing as my daily life game of reference, as it has happened the most with this series, but it's happened with others, too.

(This is not just a me thing, of course. The vast, vast majority of people who pick up these games drop them eventually. But I can only talk about how it is for me.)

What's interesting to me is that stopping is rarely a conscious decision. I don't wake up one day and go, "you know, I'm kind of bored playing Animal Crossing, I think I'll just stop." I don't even think about it at all. The spot in my daily routine where Animal Crossing went gets filled by other things, and I forget, until it's a week later and I remember, and I go, "ah hell, whatevz, I'm like done with it for real." That's when I actually make the decision; but it's really been made for me already, through some kind of indefinable neuro-stochastic process.

It never feels like it could happen, though.

I'm a reasonably obsessive Animal Crossing player. Or maybe just an average one, I don't know. I restart the save until I get a layout I like. I make a bespoke map of my town by hand and plan out where I want roads and trees and so on to go. I make my own custom paths, or at least edit them to match each season's terrain. I get everything just right, for months, sometimes years.

New Leaf is where I cut it off. If I got New Horizons I would never emerge.

The flipside to this is that I eventually do get it just right, more or less. At the end the only struggle task is filling out the catalogue with the meager rare pieces of furniture left, and even I'm not so obsessive that this task appeals to me. All that's really left is the maintenance, of flowers and of fake friends; the real struggle is over.

I do not really enjoy a perfect town. It is fun for about 5 minutes. I don't derive any pleasure from showing it to friends (real ones) or to strangers, or keeping it to myself. I don't really enjoy anything anymore; the struggle was a distraction. I don't know what to do with it.

Once I had fun systematically destroying a finished town, which was sort of meditative. Dead and empty is its own kind of perfect. Nothingness is unassailable, it is immune to criticism or ideals, it is perhaps even (Trump voice) the biggest and best form of perfect there is. (obamna.)

But that perfect-making endeavor was a conscious decision, which is not what I am talking about. What I mean to talk about is when I forget, and I don't open the game for a while, and well, off to the bin with that one.

...It's hard not to play along and see the game world as "real", in a way. That's kind of the point, the game is an imaginative aid, like pylon bulkhead diagrams and hentai and sea level rise projections and sundry other forms of pornography.

Particularly sentimental and/or autistic people imagine the game world going on without them inside the cartridge (or memory card, or chunk of memory, or what-have-you). This is quite sad and I will not get into it.

Besides, on a technical level, it's not like that. If I never touch the cartridge again, it will never be updated with the new time. Everything is frozen.

So for me, I like to imagine it stuck like that. I check the mail, get the flowers just right, talk to my neighbors, finish a project. The basement is a little messy, but that's okay. The museum is full of fish. The wind turbine on the sea cliff whirs in silent contemplation. A little bit of bossa nova hits at 5pm, designed perfectly for your after-work/NEET lunch hour playing experience. Everything is left frozen forever on that one last, perfect, day.

...

There is a genre of nerd "humour" based around taking video game mechanics and applying them to real life. Go into stranger's houses and break all their pots for money, double-jump parkour, etc.

I don't know if I've seen someone talk about the last day before though. Which is a shame, because to me it's really funny.

Imagine if every day you had to choose on purpose to wake up and live your life. If you get bored or unhappy, you don't have to commit to any special effort: it just won't happen anymore. At the end, the near-full moon hangs in a rainbow halo. An aging cargo jet blinks out her position in the night, then disappears over the horizon. The neighbor's wind chimes clink in the breeze. And then there isn't any more.

...Of course, if we're applying the same video game logic, you can always come back and try again!

Nice and high and far apart, contrails contribute more to global warming than carbon emissions so fuck your SAF, but it's nice seeing the fluffy white lines wavering into nothing, can't I just have this one thing? It's less bad than rice, which is all I care to eat anymore. Rice and oatmeal, and cottage cheese,

The A380 roar on climbout sets primal part of me set on obsidian-flakepoint but I listen closely to it anyway...

In other bigness news the Atlas Air 747 delivering troops on the big Naval runway nobody else uses wakes me the fuck up,

the E-2D advanced hawkeye with its weird UFO lentil and its transponder off rumbling overhead, unmistakable, always listening

and high-above silent nuclear-proof E-3 sweeps too. It would be the most beautiful if it weren't for its radome but it has a job to do.

the Pink Jet turns all red in sunset light,

a Socata TBM's rare turboprop buzz both quiet and strange,

two WWII warbirds turned lovebirds fly side-by-side in gentle loops before the big airshow,

Israeli jet all done pretending to be Iranian comes screaming home to roost with its fellow British racefaking brethren,

and then of course always all the little Skyhawks in 60-something mating swarm.

An MD-11 would have blinked softly red and white high above deep one night last year but she got ripped apart last year by some accident of physics or mistake of man and now I don't get to see them anymore and maybe never will.

Bizjets with anonymized transponders doppler effect away carrying Kardashians, hopefully directly into a mountainface but probably not, that only happens to Kobe,

In the seabed off Anacapa maybe 10% of an inadequately maintenanced MD-80 is left, they did their best but there's always little pieces you can't pick up.

On foggy nights the train, and massive urging triple-sevens to Taipei, and my neighbor with a flashlight rooting through the dumpster.

Unknowing of its ugliness a Spirit A320 lands at LAX like it could do it every day for the rest of its life. Nobody tell her

When it rains it pours and when it burns so come the last DC-10s, or they will, or they won't, we won't know until the dust is settled on the sad MD-11 thing. three-holer problems