#game92

It is so weird to me that the Cities in Motion pair have been this blog’s major stumbling block – perhaps even its death knell – because for the longest time I looked forward to them with anticipation, or as close to it as anything around here gets. Obviously, first off, it wasn’t *just* the games themselves that did it, so much as the final erosion of my own willingness to spend time with games that I wouldn’t enjoy, here in this year of years, when even though I - like most of us - have been measurably inside and available more than any other year of this silly little life, I simultaneously lost the sense of frivolity necessary to sustain this parade of pointlessness, wherein meaning would only ever be created by consistency itself, dedication to the task at hand. If I had my time over, perhaps I would’ve placed less emphasis on the need to have *a thought* about each and every game, back there at the beginning, and do something more in the manner of Kris Ligman’s version of this sort of thing.  

But Fuck, the games themselves did not help. Cities in Motion 2 has – I think it is fair to say – one of the worst tutorials I’ve ever encountered. It’s so bad that I (a person who keep-in-mind has spent ten hours or so fumbling with this game’s predecessor) bounced off it repeatedly rather than straggle through the requisite minimum hour with it. Even as it meant letting this once-proud blog (lol) slide further into oblivion. Even as my city, alone amongst Australian cities, backslid into a hard second lockdown, complete with curfew, and for four months we were once again shorn of things to do outside the house. Even as I spent my time playing other games, good games, fun games, thoughtful games, or staring anxiously at the wall. Even with every reason to just grit my teeth and bear it so I can just move on with my life, move on with this list, feel like I’d done something measurable on a day that seemed indistinguishable from many of the one hundred plus days before it, make some reasonable record of the weird time I was living through, I could not.

This year has been awful, for so many people, in distinct and overlapping ways. I never did manage to play a full hour of Cities in Motion 2, public transport tycoon simulator, and perhaps in the wash-up of waiting I can admit that this project might be dead forever, TBC, and good riddance. I wanted this blog to follow me through life and perform an semi-accidental shadow memory of the real thing, but this year I found out that I wouldn’t always be willing to take it with me. In brighter news, last week, for the first time since March, I caught public transport – a tram and a train – to the west of the city, to meet friends for a pint or four on a Saturday afternoon, safe in the knowledge that after months of a hard lockdown, this city I live in had effectively eliminated the virus, for now at least, and that catching public transport was no longer the nauseating enclosed risk that it so recently seemed to have posed – that it still does pose in most other places in the world. Everything changed and it changed and it changed again. Still, the sun rises every day, etc.

Happy New Year.