Lost in another world

A few days ago I was playing Ghost Recon 2 on my Xbox. After obeying orders from a faceless commander and rescuing stranded soldiers for the umpteenth time, I realized that I was bored. The game simply wasn't challenging me, nor making me think much.

I shut off the Xbox and wandered upstairs to a pile of CDs that is waiting to be put into our new desk. I located something I haven't fired up in years...

Command & Conquer - Tiberian Sun.

Yeah, yeah. Trading one war game for another. But, if you've played any of the other C&C games, or Civilization, Call to Power, etc, then you'll know why they can be so much fun (and suck up so much time).

I fired up C&C and about 2 hours later I realized that my wife was home and wanted to eat dinner.

Last night Rach found her copy of Call to Power II. She installed it and off she went. I was sitting on the bed on my laptop and she was at the desk on our desktop. About three hours later after I had finally managed to destroy my enemies base (after having much trouble gathering the resources and defending my base), I shut things down.

As we were falling asleep, Rach turns to me and says: "Sorry I played my game all night honey. But after I saw you playing the other day it made me want to play my game. I really didn't get to talk to you tonight, hope you don't mind."

Nope. I didn't mind. For three hours we both got to be in our own little worlds, where we were in charge of ensuring the survival of our (virtual) people. She was building a society (and incidentally was able to create the Internet), and I was building an army.

It was three hours of not-so-mindless silence where we both got to take our brains off the day-to-day pressures and things demanding our attention...

Like grocery shopping.