Finished Crimson Skies this evening (for the second time). At the end there’s the usual giant boss fight and I died a couple of time and realised that I just didn’t care about doing it properly, that it wasn’t going to rain glory down upon my head. Wouldn’t even make me raise my arms high like Rocky at the top of the stairs.

So, I just activated God mode and flung the plane around until the job was done. There really is nothing quite like God mode for making a game empty and pointless. It’s like a sudden and utter stripping of meaning from that little digital life.

Which makes you wonder whether immortality in the real world would suffer from the same kind of soul-destroying ennui. Vampires? Minor deities walking among us? Can I get some answers please?

Played a fair amount of empty-headed Crimson Skies this evening, prompting me to snap my fingers in that “drat!” way and recall I’m meant to play with a notebook at hand to record my deep and worthy impressions. The notebook is more of a talisman, though, for the idea of having a particular intention when I sit down to play – in this case the intention to think as well as interact.

The whole intention thing is big. The other particularly large example for me is to do with meditation. Specifically, I try to set my intention clearly about my meditation session – to just be aware and so on. But still it sometimes slips through my fingers, probably because I don’t take the intention itself seriously.

All of this reminds me most of all of the idea involved in Mulsim prayer (salat) where you form the intention to pray, and then that intention can’t be broken in the interim between its formation and the praying itself. In a sense, this is about taking things seriously. You don’t mess around with prayer.

And, in theory, I don’t want to mess around with meditation or playing games thoughtfully either so… let’s set those intentions firmly. Like a really good filling.

Played two hours or so of Crimson Skies this afternoon. Not an especially notable session of play except that it was in that particular mode where I was playing to escape from reality – not something I usually do. After an extremely intense day of work (planning courses, pitching a book idea to excruciatingly smart people, editing an academic book), I was unable to cope with actually doing anything when I got home.

Two hours later, I’d played a bunch of Crimson Skies, without having an original thought about it the entire time. I can’t quite decide amongst interpretations of this, if a choice even needs to be made. For instance, is this some kind of pure form of play? The play where you’re lost in it and unthinking and ‘just playing’? Also, is this a miracle cure for those times when I feel incapacitated… a kind of restoration of my sense of self-efficacy? Was I wasting my time? Did I even exist during those two hours, or did Nathan from Crimson Skies exists, and Pippin from reality temporarily flicker out?

And who wrote this on a napkin on the kitchen table?

Those crimson eyes
tell crimson lies;

But those crimson thighs
tell truth alright.

My crimson eyes
ask crimson ‘why?’s, and

It’s crimson skies
for us tonight.