A new strategy

Do you remember a game called Shadowfire? It was a Spectrum game initially, point-and-click strategy, albeit without a mouse. It was incredibly tough, I never really felt I had a handle on it, and yet… it was released the year after teenage me lost two close family members. Oddly, it really helped me through that time.

Without wishing to go into masses of detail, the past six months have been among the toughest of my life, and I’ve found myself kind of reckoning with my own mortality.

My parents – and there’s no real way of sugarcoating this – are reaching the end of their lives. Both are in their 80s, and neither is in the best of health. My relationship with them has changed in the past year, in as much as they’re becoming more and more dependent on my sisters and I for assistance. Furthermore, my day job has been absolutely battered by COVID, and it feels like my career – and income – has dropped off a cliff. More happily, by the time you read this column, it’s highly likely I will have become a grandfather.

Both good and bad, it’s all rather a lot of big stuff that we’re wrestling with, and it feels like I’m moving into a new phase of life, one where I’m one of the most senior members of the family.

I always wondered, when I was younger, whether I’d still be playing videogames when I was an old man. In the eyes of that younger me, I am what now would be considered an old man. A grey-bearded grandfather.

And what I’m finding really interesting is that – yes – I am still playing games, but my taste feels like it’s shifting, ever so slightly. I’m finding myself seeking out genres that I haven’t played in years. Namely – hello, Shadowfire – strategy games.

There was a time when Command & Conquer was my go-to franchise, but somewhere along the way I gave it all up for the more visceral, in-your-face, thrills of the first-person shooter. Of late, I’ve wasted entire days on Civilization VI.

Going right back to Lords Of Midnight, to Populous, through Herzog Zwei on the Mega Drive, and

Warcraft III… strategy games would do something to my brain in a way that an action game wouldn’t. Perhaps it was because I was forced to use a lessemotional side of myself, I always got more lost in them. And that’s exactly what I need, during what has been a very emotional and trying year. Or two.

It has giving me breathing room to let big life events filter through and process at a somewhat more manageable rate. I’ve been able to hang onto some greater sense of self than I otherwise would, because I’ve had these hours where my emotions effectively get parked off to one side.

Moving forwards, maybe it’s time to dig out some of those classics again. Maybe it’s time I reopened the Tiberium mines.

Strategy games would do something to my brain in a way that an action game wouldn’t