Plenty of my friends, including my beloved Mark, are game programmers, so I am somewhat reluctant to say this next thing I have to say.  But I feel I must tell you, interwebs: video games are a blight on the human condition.

See, here’s how I see it: we, as human beings, are driven to accomplish things.  To make, to create, to do.  It’s a need–one at the very top of Maslow’s Pyramid, but a need just the same. It’s why we write books and compose songs and put people on the freaking moon.

Games fill that need.  Or rather, they provide the illusion of filling it.  In the same way that a Krispy Kreme doughnut is fake food, games are fake accomplishments.

And just as a doughnut is sweeter than any legitimately nourishing food, in-game accomplishments come faster and more reliably than any legitimately nourishing acts.  They fill you up, too.  Who really needs to write a book when you’ve just completed your collection of skull cut gems in the Sims?

Would you like to know how many hours of my time this picture represents? Yeah, so would I.

All of this is my way of saying that if I have one true enemy in my quest to become a published writer, it is EA Studios.  No, wait, it’s Wizards of the Coast.  No, wait, it’s me.

Back tomorrow with lots of livebloging goodness!

Anyway, this weekend I got the chance to try out my zombie busting skillz for the first time, with a little gem from PopCap called Plants vs. Zombies. Basically, you defend your home from zombies by planting various plants, each of which have abilities such as shooting peas, tossing watermelons, or expelling poisonous gas.

Mark downloaded it first, then after a few hours he let me take a crack at it. He watched me play the first few levels. “Ah,” he mused, “to be young again and playing Plants vs. Zombies for the first time.”

I totally get it, babe. Because, man, these plants! These zombies! They are totally addictive, and it’s only now, after a full two days of immersion, that I am starting to break away.

What’s so great about Plants vs. Zombies?

First of all: cute! The art in the game is really charming; even the zombies manage to look adorable. I mean, look at that guy. With a cone on his head! Silly zombie.

Second of all: grindable! The game has a wealth of things to buy, complete, collect, and otherwise muck about with. It’s chicken soup for the obsessive compulsive soul.

It’s been a long time since I enjoyed a game this much, and to be honest it doesn’t come at the best time. I am, for the first time in a long time, in flow with my writing. Deep flow. Like, rip tide. I’m talking push-on-through-to-the-end-of-the-book-and-get-it-in-the-mail flow. And if my flow has one nemesis in all the world, it’s — no, not zombies –gaming.

I hope I won’t be accused of melodrama if I say that, through gaming, I have come to understand how alcoholics feel about alcohol. It’s not just a compulsion, you understand. It’s love. It’s the beautiful, rich color of a really good scotch. It’s the giddy feeling you get when you toast a zombie with your Cob Cannon just as he steps onto your porch.

For better or worse, but I think forever — I love to game. Love it enough to ignore the other things I love, like reading and socializing and writing my book. And so to have some zombie come and woo my inner gamer right now, just when I’ve gotten into flow — well, it frightens me. Which is why the mouse I need to play this game is at home, and I am currently at Borders.

Blogging about Plants vs. Zombies.

Important news stories I missed out on:

None that I can find. I knew about the new trillion $ spending package, because Mark told me. They do know there are numbers lower than a trillion, right?

Pissy little news stories I missed out on:

• Octomom fires her kids’ nurses
• Yet more dishing about singer Rihanna and what she should do about her relationship with abuser Chris Brown (my vote: tune out the media completely and just take care of herself)

Times I cheated:

Several. Most of these were fairly innocent slips: Mark likes to watch Mad Money; I like to sit with Mark. I can’t follow most of what Jim Cramer says anyway.

The worst offense was probably the first night, after I spent several hours on the web dealing with various government forms (it turns out my marriage license IS my marriage certificate). After that I really felt like I needed to float in the billowy warmth of the interwebs. So I loaded up the Freakonomics blog and just scanned through the post titles. I did not inhale!

Times I greeted Mark at the door with an irate comment about what Congress had been up to that day:

Zero.

Changes to Productivity:

Substantial, and all for the better. I’m not sure this can be attributed solely to the Blackout; I also acquired a lovely new car, which enabled me to get out the the library more often. And I got back to blocking out my schedule in a serious fashion, which also helped.

But the Blackout was a boon to my work life, I think. It increased productivity at least somewhat, especially in the morning, when I often spend a good bit of time surfing the web. And increased productivity leads to increased momentum, which creates mroe productivity… you get the picture. It was a good thing.

Changes to Mood:

Also substantial, and for the better. Part of that is attributable to… let’s hear it again… increased productivity!

But I honestly believe that lowering my news quotient was good for my soul. I was spending an unpleasant amount of time angry, and that’s just no good. This week was a great break from all that. It reminded me of the kind of person I want to be: Someone who values other people, whether or not they agree with me; someone who looks for the best in others and not the worst.

Going Forward:

I want to take something of this week with me, but I don’t necessarily want to tune out entirely. So here’s the plan. Some of my websties will become dailies: major news sites, friends’ blogs, and Murderati are a few. I’ll look at these once a day, after work. Everything else will become a weekly: I’ll check them out on Friday and ignore them the rest of the week. And I think I’ll do a regular Blackout: say, every three months.

I hope this will let me keep my hand in without getting totally absorbed in the big media machine. If nothing else, it should give me more time for writing!

I started doing this during the run up to the election. It was interesting, and also a convenient form of procrastination that felt reasonably meaningful and useful. But I have to face a simple fact:

It’s made me a less happy person.

It turns out I don’t like knowing quite this much about what’s going on in the world. A lot of what I read makes me angry, or apprehensive, or both. I don’t mean to suggest that a tuned out life is a better life… but maybe, just maybe, I could give it a whirl.

So I’m taking a week-long break from the news. No CNN. No FoxNews. No news on TV. I’ll also take the opportunity to cleanse my life of a lot of the other websites I waste time on everyday. No Cakewrecks. No Murderati. No Twitter. I’ll continue to read actual friends’ blogs, because there aren’t that many of them and it really shouldn’t take more than an hour a week. Also, ’cause I just can’t go cold turkey.

I’m looking forward to this experiment. The ideal results would be an improved mood and increased production on my book. But frankly, I’d take either.