Midflight Occupation

I am, once again, on the verge of a busy few weeks. Or have been, if the fact that I missed last week due to being slammed through Sunday. And now I’m about to be away again, gallivanting for a bit and I still have to finish packing. There’s an eighteen-hour flight ahead of me which can only mean one thing.

Civilization VI.

I’m not good at sleeping on planes. Something about being tall and the unforgiving dimensions of economy-class seats don’t exactly yield a restful time. And somewhere along the way I became acutely aware of how terrible the audio quality is of in-flight entertainment making watching most things kinda lackluster. Books and crosswords are great, but when I’m on a long flight my goal is to not just kill time but to annihilate it and so: Civilization VI.

Civilization is a game I can just get lost in, always yearning for just one more turn. Just as good, it runs on my laptop and requires just enough focus that I can dial in on it but still mindless enough that I don’t need to think too hard about it while my plans come to fruition. That those plans can sometimes take hours to pay off is only part of the fun. Put some music on and it becomes the perfect plane game, a way to while away the hours while having fun.

It certainly helps that plane rides are one of those times when you absolutely have no other responsibilities but to wait. There’s nothing else to do, really, because there’s not much you can do but wait until you land. It’s a period I find quite restless — that waiting of being neither here nor there with nothing to do but be idle. This liminal period is a great time for pointless games, because, well, there’s nothing else to do and there’s nothing else I need to do.

Playing a game like Civilization sometimes feels like I’m stealing time, like I’m burning hours when there’s something better I ought to be doing, be it writing a blog post, cooking dinner, or playing a different video game I’ve been meaning to play. It’s hard to justify spending time doing not much, especially with this latent need to be productive etched in the back of my mind. That willingness to be able to be still and not need to be doing is something I know I need to work on (and something I’ve certainly blogged about here). But in the meantime, flying, for all its ills and my discomfort with it all, is a time when I have an excuse to really, truly do nothing. 

And that means playing a marathon session of Civilization VI.