Absence makes the heart grow fonder?

The old saying I reference above zinged into my head in the early hours one morning. I’ve been away in the US on a business trip, which is significantly less fun that you’d think, and I was lying awake at about 3:30 one morning contemplating life and the thought stuck me.

I REALLY miss a large number of things when I away. I miss my girlfriend of course, I miss my cats, I miss my bed – there’s nothing like your own bed really – I miss cooking and eating properly. I also miss games.

This sounds like a crow-barred comment which I’m simply using to post a ‘woe-is-me’ missive about how hard my life of international travel is, but really I do miss my games. My respite has been the PMOG ‘The Nethernet‘ as introduced to me here, on Ready-Up by Donna. It was while I was compiling my first Mission that I realised just how much I need the creative (or destructive) release from the day-to-day stuff of life which my games deliver. This has been highlighted due the to heinous oversight I made in neglecting to pack my PSP.

Is this an addiction? The signs would not point to such, I don’t suffer from the usual signs of withdrawal (shakes, sweat, anxiety) but I do feel like there is something… well… missing really if I’m not, for at least some of the time, suspended in an alternate reality solving puzzles, fighting the demon foe or thrashing the nuts off my latest 4-wheeled acquisition.
Self-reflection shows that this ‘fits’. I spend a long time every day dealing with work, I wear quite a few hats for different organisations and when most of your work is thinking rather than doing it’s very difficult to actually stop working at all so the immersion in game-space provides that all important ‘off-switch’ to juggling resource scheduling, business forecasting, DR Planning and technical infrastructure design (eeerchk it’s sound’s even more horrible when I type it!).

When I returned home, it was to a profound sense of relief. I didn’t immediatly switch on the Xbox360 or PS3 though, I sat down had a cup of tea and felt at ease. The need TO game was still sub-consiously there, but was significantly reduced by the simple knowledge that I could, if I wanted too.