I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I am a casual gamer in addition to being a writer. It’s actually not that uncommon these days for people to be casual gamers, thanks especially to the birth of the smart phone. It’s beautiful innovation has allowed many a new age gamer to be born in the app stores of endless available games for every type of gamer.

As the title suggests, I have been playing a Viking game lately. Namely, I have been hardcore addicted to Valheim. My partner bought me the game last weekend and I haven’t gone a single day without logging in to kill a troll, chop some wood to work on my massive log cabin or do other fantastic and wonderful Vikingesque stuff in this incredible game. Because of this new found addicting game, I figured I would talk about my gaming in general. I follow some other writers I love to read and noticed that several of them are also gamers. The beautiful thing is that most of them are multi-platform like myself. So let’s go into my preferences so you can understand how I spend my downtime when I’m not writing stories.

Firstly, I spend most of my gaming time on PC. I have been a laptop/PC gamer for most of my late teenage and adult life. This started with arcade style games in high school and playing Mortal Kombat at the local bowling alley. I wasted so many quarters after bowling league every week trying to kill everyone that stepped up to challenge me on the old arcade machine. It was one of two machines in the back area and the only one that interested me. When I went off to college, I went out of my way to get a console and a cheap used copy of Mortal Kombat from the local Game Stop and played that a lot in my first couple years of college. I even had all the cheat codes printed and stowed in the disc case in case I forgot any. But Sasha, what does this have to do with the computer? Well, I met a person I liked for a short while. This person noticed I thoroughly enjoyed the beautiful gore that came with the K.O. screen. Because of this, they pulled out their laptop and loaded up World of Warcraft and showed me around the game a little. Not long after that, I had my own WoW account and made an adorable little undead female warlock that to this day I still have as my main (16 year old character).

Of course, WoW can be a gateway game for some people. I have played every single expansion since vanilla. I told myself several times over the years I won’t buy the newest expansion on release because I don’t have time and for all but two of them, I buy it on pre-order and play as time allows. I used to be a hardcore raider and dedicated a lot of my weekends to guilds and small circles of friends for PVP and dungeon runs. In the last four years, I backed off and became a casual. I did dabble in League of Legends as well about nine years ago but I dropped it pretty quickly when I met my partner. And naturally, I have a Steam account, so I have a small library of computer games I play there including Stardew Valley, Satisfactory, Fall Guys, Fallout 4, Portal and Portal 2, The Sims 3 and The Sims 4, Terraria, and so many more.

My video game adventures don’t end at the keyboard though. I do also enjoy console, as previously noted with Mortal Kombat. In the last year or so, I purchased a Switch so I could enjoy Pokemon Sword, Pokemon Let’s Go Eevee, Mortal Kombat 11, and Animal Crossing New Horizons. Because of my gaming habits, I actually had to make my played hours private on my Switch since some of my extended family saw the hours put into a couple of my games and questioned how the heck I have so much time to play games with all the other stuff going on in my world, including raising a toddler. We won’t go into the math and what balls dropped in the process, just know that I make sure the important balls are still getting juggled appropriately.

So Vikings? Yes. Vikings. I am hella addicted to this game and I hope that I can re-balance time tables better to support more words. I am going to try to setup some new expectations for myself since this week will also be my return to office for work. This means I will also be getting in a lot more steps than before since I need to do a lot of running around for this new position I will be starting.

Thank you for reading!