Adding More Active Entertainment

I did not only evaluate my software development progress, but my entertainment as well. I want to have a healthy dose of life. For enterntainment, I binge watch anime. It used to be programming, but I’ve solved most of my problems at the moment. Now, I’m looking at how to solve other people’s problems. I mean, that’s how one makes money. Yeah, if you have any needs around managing a linux os in the cloud, AWS stuff, want CLI tools for automating some stuff, internal tools, backend APIs, managing databases or systems programming. Send me an email and we can talk.

Back to the purpose of the article. Yeah. I watch anime as a form of entertainment. Nothing wrong with that. However, the passivity is seeping through real life. Instead of doing something engaging to keep the proactiveness, I’ll be looking for the next isekai. Entertainment is necessary. You can’t work 24/7, you’ll burn out. I did a research and learned that there’s something called active entertainment. It wasn’t a new concept to me. Sporting activities are active entertainment. But, with the number of friends too small for my fingers and us being separated by distances, physical sporing activities would not be an option for active entertainment. I mean, once a while we can meet up, but it cannot be consistent and stable.

Another option is video games. The goal of active entertainment is interactivity. I haven’t been a fun of video games for a long time. Nothing against the gamers. Maybe it’s because I didn’t have a device to explore. My experience with video games was in university. I remember on Friday nights till Saturday morning, my party will gather. Shoutout to Robert and Abdul. We played Apex Legends on mobile. It was fun and being able to communicate with friends and sharing the tasks. Wonderful. On the weekdays, we train personally and then on the weekends, we go for campaigns together.

I decided to give it a try as my main form of entertainment. There are some studies that show that such level of engagement expands certain congnitive functions with time when managed properly. I decided to go on a video game search. I didn’t want to start with something as intense as Apex Legends. Would do that some time in the future after getting a stable stream of income. Because such games we don’t go for 30 mins or an hour. We are talking minimum of 4 to 5 hours if you want to enter the zone. In my current season, I’ll dail down a bit.

I listen to someordinarygamers for news and linux stuff. From his channel name you can tell he is a gamer. He played a game called Doki Doki Literature Club. It is a visual novel game under the surreal horror genre. After looking at the playthrough (contains spoilers), it was interesting and decided to make it my first game in my library. You can play it over and over again and have a different experience each time because there are multiple endings.

I launched into the deep to find similar games and I picked Twilight Observer . Like Doki Doki, it has multiple endings based on the choices you make. It is more of a dectective murder mystery game.

For the final one, I wanted something with an open world and a dose of action. We men love some action. This was a tough one because there are so many good options. I settled on Red Dead Redemption, the classic one from Rockstar Games. If you don’t know Rockstar, think GTA.

The choices are also strategic. Modern video games can go to hundreds of gigabytes. Some require the internet for full features. However, I skipped those. Here is a summary of what I have for my active entertainment time.

Game	Main Genre	Size	Comment
Doki Doki Literature Club	visual novel, surreal horror	~300MB	Fully playable offline
Twilight Observer	visual novel, mystery	~500MB	Fully playable offline
Red Dead Redemption	open world, action	~10GB	Fully playable offline

Concluding Words

Not that I not going to watch anime at all, but it is going to be significantly less. Yeah, let’s see how this affects my proactiveness during my leisure. See you in the next one. Remember to enjoy life.