Defragmenting

I'm defragmenting my home computer. Today, I deleted a game I've played for a long time from my computer, which is why I decided to defragment it, since defragmenting will complete, in some sense, the deletion.

I haven't really played the game in some months, but I did log on the other day to give away some stuff I thought might be useful to friends.

When I first played, the game world was HUGE, and I really couldn't imagine other people around the world also controlling the avatars I interacted with. I had difficulty telling the avatars (computer generated graphic models controlled by real life people) from the mobs (the computer controlled beings, some of which use the same graphic models as the game provides for avatars).

I played with some really fun people to achieve some common goals involving teamwork, timing, and skill.

The downside was that achieving those goals took a serious time investment, not only in doing X or Y to achieve the goal, but in preparing in other ways, practicing strategies, working on skills, whatever. That's a lot of time I could be doing other things.

And it's just weird to go home from work, log on, and do the game thing, and not really be able to talk about it at work, not because it's illegal or immoral, but because it's not what faculty folks are supposed to be doing on so many levels.

So now my avatar joins Snork, Cisne, Cobi, Ailaminu, Koi, Jaye, and my first game friend Gyron in retirement. It's been a long, strange trip across continents and worlds while sitting on my sofa.

Still, I'm more than ready to be done this time, and it feels good to be defragmenting my life, as well as my computer, just a little bit.