All posts by Frank

137/365 – Meditation Games #137 – Repeating Leavetaking

I have the fortune to be, for the most part, grounded where I am and where I was born and raised. My family, for the most part, is close at hand, and a familiarity and intimate knowledge of the place I call home means I’m never far from where I grew up, went to school, met who I know and loved, and currently, live my life as best as I can. Constant travel is not something I necessarily have to deal with. This is partially why I appreciate the message that this developer was trying to send in trying to elicit or depict the feeling that was being experienced when they are constantly traveling from the place they call home. 

136/365 – Meditation Games #136 – Hope Blooming

Some of the developer’s launcher quote today made me chuckle a little bit – not necessarily because of the fact that I didn’t believe what they were saying, but because of the fact that I’m from a place that tends to have very violently different weather depending on what day it might be. To me, the month of May is that creeping sense of whether or not the warm weather from one day will stick around or will suddenly just drop to cold and rainy the next.

135/365 – Meditation Games #135 – Exploring Pain And Loss

Events that stick with us and can affect us are double-edged in nature. While there are some times that there are meaningful, impactful positive events in life that can be game-changing, the same is true for the most traumatic, negative, and painful events in our lives. While I think most people understand this, I think that there’s an underestimation sometimes about how deeply the bad events, especially if they involve family, can cut to the bone and can stay with people.

134/365 – Meditation Games #134 – Friends At The End

The conflict between comrades or best of friends is an emotional trope that is used quite often in games. In fact a lot of times it’s been used so often and perhaps so blatantly that after a while it becomes a bit predictable, or even slightly unoriginal. For games, I think part of why it gets this stale is because there’s an idea that exploring the idea of friend betrayal followed by conflict and emotional battling has been done from almost every different angle when it comes to trying to get at it. It leads to a sort of paint by numbers idea when it comes to this stuff and is pretty repetitive.

133/365 – Meditation Games #133 – Distortion Of The Coping Routine

There’s a sense of purposeful repetitiveness to coping with something that happens to you that you have to deal with, that is not the best of things, or which temporarily or permanently changes you  or makes it difficult for you to deal with, well, living. It can be a tragedy, or a traumatic event, or a sense of loss, or anything like that, but the advice that people sometimes give is that settling into the routine, trying to concentrate on going through some of the rote things that you don’t think about, gives you structure and helps you to keep yourself going.

132/365 – Meditation Games #132 – Temporary Butterfly

It’s no secret that people will enter and exit your sphere of influence and work with or be with you in the course of your life. Some of these will stay with you for longer than others, and a subset of these will be, on some level of another, special enough to intend on being not only close to you but to be there for practically forever.

131/365 – Meditation Games #131 – The Gods’ View

The old school pixellated, pre-8 bit days, I think, had a bit of trouble trying to depict going up anything. Most of the presentation tended to be side-scrolly or top-down, relying on mechanics and a bunch of visual game elements to make things a bit more exciting. Thankfully, these days you can be a bit more imaginative, which is why Aviv’s entry manages to re-create a mountain climb to an ancient temple without much difficulty.

130/365 – Meditation Games #130 – Arrangement Anxiety

Anxiety is something that I’ve felt at times during my life, but it wasn’t until I had to help and deal with others who had it that I began to understand, at least as much as I could not being first-hand experiencing it, how difficult it can get for people. For those who struggle with anxiety and anxiety attacks, it’s much more than just the occasional feeling that you get when you have something that you’re nervous about or if you’ve had a somewhat bad or stressful day. For those for which it is a persistent and difficult issue, it’s a crushing, paralyzing experience that keeps people from being able to enjoy or even deal with the normal everyday events and occurrences in life.

129/365 – Meditation Games #129 – Against All Shoot-‘Em-Up Odds

Arcade-like shoot-’em-up games were a favorite of mine when I was growing up with games, and not just because of the fact that they were visually appealing or featured a lot of pleasantly satisfying explosions and challenging stages filled with automatic scrolling  goodness. The genre was one that I liked to gravitate towards because without fail, most shmup games presented you, the single ace pilot and the chosen one, as one that had to fly and shoot their way through overwhelming numbers to save the day.

128/365 – Meditation Games #128 – Dance Break On The Reef

Normally puns aren’t really my thing – I’m the kind of person that tends to groan at them more than make them, but in this case, I found myself chuckling at how appropriate it was. Having a Meditations game entry happen on “May-8” to talk a bit about Australia day is entirely appropriate for what was shown today in a bit of levity that was tempered by a bit of seriousness about the day as a whole as well as treatment of nature. The beach is usually a place that, while inhabited by fellow humans due to how nice it is in the right kind of weather, is also a place where nature can be observed in the form of beach and shore animal life. I know I’ve spent many a beach day enjoying watching the animals live their lives on the beach and near the reefs, most of the time blissfully ignorant of the humans cluttering up their home for the day.