Basically, you have a big tractor that's been jury-rigged into a tunnel-boring machine, and you're digging deep into the underdark looking for fossils, trinkets and goo-gaws to sell.
You turn the money earned into upgrades for your digging equipment. It's surprisingly addictive, for all its simplicity. I wasted about 3 hours on it yesterday, until my phone ran out of juice and died in the midst of a dig (my progress was saved, fyi).
Oddly enough, instead of digging a series of shafts, carefully ferreting out the nougaty goodness of Roman coins and mineralized fish carcass, I'm digging a gigantic pit mine.
I have this enormous cavern dug out, and when I descend from ground level, I free-fall for hundreds of feet before coming to the current bottom, where I carefully, gleefully clear just one more neat, level row of excavation before rocketing (LOVE the rocket!) back to the surface to hock my subterranean wares. Is this careful virtual digging another symptom of OCD?
Am I, in truth, digging into my psyche? What if there is no game, no app, no phone?? Just me, sitting, glazed, hands held up holding an imaginary device, digging an imaginary hole into my wounded, sobbing ID?? What if the Etruscan Vase power-up represents my feminine side, at war with my reptilian need for a jetpack? No, wait - it's all real. Whew!
I wonder if there are research studies that observe exactly how different people play games, and what it means about them...?
i dig it, but for other reasons. mindless escape for 20 min into another world.
ReplyDeletenothing but gold