Take Me Home, Country Roads
Where have I been?
Writing, as I’ve always been told, is a muscle. The more your exercise it, the stronger it gets. So you have to exercise consistently. Any writer will tell you that it’s easier said than done. Any writer will also tell you that distractions come very easily when you’re supposed to be putting pen to paper.
My distraction has been a virtual trip to West Virginia. I’ve never played a Fallout game before. This all began during a casual conversation with my mother-in-law, who encouraged us to play. I was (and still am) trying to get through “Assassins Creed: Odyssey” but it was enough encouragement to get my husband to give it a try. After all, “Fallout 76” is an online game and they’d both be able to team up and go on quests. Well, he was hooked. He played for days and quickly leveled up–surpassing his mom’s level.
Soon, a very innocent suggestion was made: “why don’t you play and we can do quests together” (we have two PS4s). I didn’t think I’d get too caught up in the game. I was still fighting for the controller from our toddler and I had other games to play.
Boy, was I wrong.
I’m not lying when I say that we played every night (sometimes days) for three months. The two parents of an energetic toddler somehow suddenly found the energy to stay up until midnight. We completed quests, we explored Appalachia, we dropped nuclear bombs and killed radiated creatures. Things escalated rather quickly. A couple days after starting, we went out and bought new headsets so we weren’t yelling across the house to each other. After that, well, it just became weird for me to have one person in the bedroom and the other in the living room. This was, after all, our quality time together while our kid was asleep.
Let me tell you all something I’ve learned as a married woman: men love an excuse to buy a new television. My husband had the idea to buy a small tv and place it in the living room so that we could be in the same place while we played. Eventually, our toddler got into the game as well. She’s learned to move the characters around and she enjoys the building/designing aspects of the game. Somehow, “Fallout 76” has become a family game for three generations of us.
Things have slowed down for now. We’ve played a lot and there’s only a little bit left for us to do until it’s just us wandering and collecting junk. It’s likely that there will be new content later on. But for now, it’s nice to be back in the real world.
