Yesterday I discovered that I could play Starcraft on the mobile internet connection here in Casa Blanca. Discovered this at 1am last night, and went to bed at 6am this morning. Then played I think two sessions of Starcraft today. I don’t know, it all gets thrown together in a blur. I play until the ragged edge, until I hate myself for playing, until I swear that I will never play this game again, or at least not until I return back to Spokane for Christmas. And then I go back to playing it.
I’m not going to hate myself over Starcraft. Not tonight. I’ll just accept that it’s a part of me, and that I might play it more while I’m here, or that I might not.
When I broke out of the spell, the thing that kept me away was that Chinese is my game. I have my own metrics. By those measures, I have done well: 3000 hours on Chinese this year, +5000 vocabulary. I finished 活着 (To Live) today, I got the pending vocab review down to zero. This is my game, and it’s a longer term game. I was thinking to myself that I should be able to learn from Starcraft, how does it change my behavior, and how can I co-opt those mechanisms? One thing I noticed about Starcraft today was the purity of flow-state. Competition leaves no time to think about something else while playing.
The only thing that Starcraft is missing is a sense of reality, and making a difference. I motivated myself to learn Arabic by imagining lives on the line. When that became too literal, moral injury followed quickly. Chinese offers a similar mountain to climb without the moral baggage, a way to play Ender’s game without becoming part of the Xenocide.
没有别的。我现在想玩星际争霸，但是我太累了。真的太累了。明天呢？什么时候？活着中文真的是更好的游戏？
Is this life learning Chinese any better of a game to play?