Press X to Continue.

I stopped posting about six months ago because I was pretty sure I was going to stop playing video games: somebody lent me a copy of Guitar Hero and I thought that'd be it. I'd put the PS2 into storage, focus on my writing, and that would be that.

Playing video games may or may not be anathema to writing. I still haven't decided. I do in fact know several writers who flat-out told me to stop playing video games and just get to work. As Brian K. Vaughan recently wrote, "'writer's block' is just another word for video games."

On the other hand, I know other writers who not only play video games, but nowadays, plot their stories while playing video games. (In fact, wasn't it Brian K. Vaughan himself who told me that he and Brubaker talk out plots while playing on X-Box Live?) And to muddy the waters further, 2006 was the year I got my highest paid writing gig ever... writing for video games.

In turn, the writing gig, combined with a bunch of pre-holiday clearance sales, put me even thicker in the video game playing woods than I'd been before. The "just played" list covers, I think, everything I played during those six months, but not everything I bought during that period: for that, you have to combine it with my "to play" list and then add the ten other games I didn't add to that list (Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, The Godfather, Max Payne 2, State of Emergency 2, True Crime: New York City, Gun, Total Overdose, Marc Ecko's Getting Up, Cold Winter and Zone of the Enders: The Second Runner, if you must know, and all of those were bought on clearance--I paid as much as twelve dollars for a game, and in a few cases, as little as three).

(And if you're keeping track, that's 23 console games purchased in slightly more than a six month period, not counting the two PC games and whatever you want to call Gametap.)

That's a lot of video games--in fact, I bet I could refrain from purchasing or renting another console game in all of 2007 and not suffer from a lack of games to play. Although I'm really over-dramatizing it, that puts me in a potentially dangerous position for the year: if I don't have the discipline to shoal up time for my writing, video games could, as they have in the past, flood those swampy lowlands I call my downtime. Because as much as I pretended otherwise, it wasn't my familiarity with video games that got me the writing gig last year: it was a familiarity with the source material and all the years I've spent writing that landed me that gig and helped me nail it. Writing a monthly column for over nearly eight years was invaluable. Playing video games during that time was negligible.

To be honest, though, the most fun writing I had during the first half of last year was writing this blog: bitching about the games I was playing, thinking about the mythos of the game I was playing, just blathering about what games to read next. I don't know how it was to read (which is almost never a good sign) but it was a lot of fun to write.

So, yes. For now, I think, more of This Crappy Controller in 2007. If I can't keep video games from overwhelming my writing time, maybe I can join them two of them together, like hostile convicts in a chain gang, and sent them loose over the lowlands together.