My gaming notebooks

I keep notebooks on video games I play. They're tabbed and organized with checklists and various notes and goals.

Where the kids want to move on, I want to find every item, quest, explore every location, etc. And optimize how I do all that as well. I can't remember how many times the kids have urged me to move on when they're watching me play, but I've got to find that last banana!

Now games come and go, and I usually toss stuff I've done for games I don't play anymore, but the kids ran across a notebook I had made for a game I played quite a bit a few years ago. My husband told me how they paged through all my notes in awe with my oldest remarking "Wow, she's really thorough!"

It just satisfies something for me to do these things to this level of detail and completeness, and of course I love figuring out new games. But I think it all stems from the reality that I can't do that for most things in the real world.

I can't test software as thoroughly as I want, I can't keep the house in the state I want, etc. etc. And so instead of getting frustrated in real life, I grind out this urges in games and it's probably a big part of what keeps me playing.

So there's clutter in the living room, there are a bizillion things I can think of to torture the product I'm qualifying that I don't have time for, but I can max out my blacksmithing skill for my level and find all the possible patterns I could make and feel content.