Ou est le chat?

Ah but it's a subtle beast, this not writing every day, isn't it? Once you've taken a rest for one day, it seems OK to take a rest for another. And then another. You're sneaky, laziness, but I'm onto you. Look, just let me have this one, will you, and try not to look to smug about the fact that you know you'll win eventually.

Nothing's leaping out subject-wise in the early hours of this morning, but I have a cat on my lap and I've stayed up late enough that there's some cricket to watch, keeping me warm and awake enough to occasionally write a sentence, and also reminding me of the many previous occasions on which I know I sat watching cricket in the early hours of the morning with a cat on my lap and wrote on this blog. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Sometimes I struggle to work out exactly what I've done with the 127,000-odd hours I've had at my disposal since about age 22, but watching cricket with a cat on my lap while writing in this blog somehow seems like it might have been a few of them. The blog is the same; only the cat is altered. (Ecce homo, ergo cat. La Fontaine knew his sister, and knew her bloody well. The point is taken, the beast is moulting; the fluff gets up your nose.)

I've been given an MMO to review recently, and I was playing it along quite nicely until I got to that point where you make your way out of the manageable-sized newbie zone, where you're being guided along and can conceivably do most of the quests available, and are dropped into the busy, big wide world. And I was suddenly almost paralysed by the sheer range of things to see and places to go and the sheer amount of stuff. It was so disconcerting that I haven't really gone back to the game as yet. 

1) I imagine it's quite similar to being from a small town/country and getting to a much bigger town/country and finding oneself quite overwhelmed, and if this is an indication, it seems like it's a challenge I'd struggle with, and it might go some way to explaining why I never tried it.

2) Could be that, at the end of the day, I just prefer it when somebody tells me what I should do next, so I don't have to think about it and take responsibility for my own damned life.

3) Could be I'm scared to take on a big challenge in general, sticking to small, easily achievable goals rather than risk failure and embarrassment by taking on the more difficult but potentially rewarding  opportunities life provides.

4) Could be that after a few hours of initial novelty, it's just that I'm pretty much over the repetitive game mechanic MMOs always throw up at you, and I'm getting bored. Yeah, that's almost certainly it. Not that other stuff. Marks off there, and definitely a few marks off  for making me reassess my entire life, too. 6 out of 10, tops.

No, but seriously, how do you review MMOs? It's hard.