If you’ve followed me for a while you know I enjoy video games and I also enjoy hiking. But what many people don’t know is that I enjoy hiking BECAUSE of video games.
My journey with exercise is complicated (like many millennials, I am sure), but as I played countless hours of Breath of the Wild, I found myself loving the freedom to explore, summit mountains, and find hidden lakes. And although I had hiked locally some, I hadn’t ventured further out. But Zelda got me wondering what I might be missing.
And that’s how I ended up waking up before dawn to climb a mountain one morning. As I crept toward the summit, I looked over the edge and saw a glittering alpine lake, just like those I’d seen in Zelda games. I gasped and realized that it felt just like those discoveries I made while playing Breath of the Wild.
Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s easier to find hidden lakes in a video game, but if in that moment someone had said to me “isn’t this SO much better than playing a video game?” I would have felt invalidated.
The reality was: it wasn’t better, it was different. The satisfaction was very different; I felt highly competent, I felt grateful to myself, I felt surprised at my own abilities. But it was also tiring, difficult, and -frankly- inaccessible in many ways.
So, sometimes I explore in a game, and sometimes I explore in real life. And thanks to staying neutral in my view of leisure activities, I can enjoy real life hiking and in-game exploration, knowing that they may evoke similar feelings but be better at different times in my life.
