Among boxes and boxes of childhood memories, there is a sketchpad full of crappy knock-off Mega Man villains. Pages and pages of these things. I'm not really sure how I came up with all of them, because I haven't had that strong of a creative impetus for years.
There was a time when I wanted to make video games. Not to design, write, code or create art for video games, just to 'make' them. Clearly I had no idea what went into making a video game, the kind of focus needed, and I came up with all sorts of game jigsaw pieces that didn't quite fit together. There were tiny level designs, multitudes of characters, an attempted novel, even a brief attempt at teaching myself C++. I was all over the place.

Now that I've settled on writing as my gaming 'major', I've looked back at what I've made, what my imagination has spit out in the last several years. Not a whole lot. I still play games just as often, if not more. I still thrown myself into myriad innovative worlds. But none of it has really reignited my creative spark.

Granted, I don't become as wholly absorbed by a game these days as I used to. As a child, I couldn't imagine the idea of playing even two games at once: why would anyone pick up another game before the previous one was done (complete or otherwise)? Now I'm juggling two books and probably six games, and it all makes sense. But perhaps this has spread my imagination too thin, like butter scraped across too much bread. Perhaps it's my own fault for not dedicating myself to one wom- um... game.

Maybe some of the creativity of youth has simply left me. Maybe it's something more personal, pointing at a deeper problem in my life. Or maybe... maybe games have truly lost some of their magic? It has been a generation of consoles since I truly fell in love with a game, and that was a rare thing even then- it used to be a common thing.

My final speculation is this- I am now more tapped in to gaming news and culture than I ever was, and multi-game ADD is getting worse than ever. So many games are coming out, and I hear about almost all of them. From every console, from every genre, there are new announcements every week, new recommendations from my favorite journalists. And it's all so beautiful.

Quite the dilemma.