Angela’s Angle

Speaking of vices (as I did in my last post), I’ve recently been thinking about guilty pleasures. Most of my life, I never really had a guilty pleasure and always felt super-lame when asked. I would embarrassedly admit (then insist) that I was not interesting enough to have one. Until now! The Pleasure I am an educated, intelligent, and mostly rational individual. I believe in the scientific method. I am quick to check out of conversations…

It’s been about five months since I’ve written a blog post. Sure, I could blame the budding of a new relationship, the death of my step-dad, or multiple bouts of the cold/flu… But since we’re all friends here, I’ll tell you the real, honest-to-goodness reason: Procrastination Do you ever prepare to start a particularly daunting task, only to find yourself quickly engaged in another? When I was in college, this was an all-too-familiar experience: I…

Recently, I stumbled across the idea of cognitive flexibility—and yet another reason to game. If you were excited, like I was, to learn that there is a game that helps you boost your resilience and overcome setbacks like depression and anxiety, then hold on to your pants! Researchers have found that gamers (specifically of first-person shooters like Call of Duty) have greater cognitive flexibility than non-gamers. Wut? Cognitive flexibility is the “mental ability to adjust thinking…

What Your Gaming Strategy Says About the Way You Love Love is said to be a game, and in looking back on my gamer loves, I’ve noticed correlations between their love and gaming strategies. Choke Point I recently went down to Seattle for Bumbershoot and stayed with an old friend, with whom I drunkenly confessed my romantic feelings five years ago—and who drunkenly reciprocated. He left for the military days later. We kept in light…

Sticking with the theme of last month, I’m going to share a few other resources for fellow fans of gamification. However, I would first like to warn against thoughtless gaming. While gamifying aspects of your life that aren’t fun or otherwise don’t give you that dopamine rush you crave can give you the nudge you need to get shit done; it can also lead to wasted time, effort, and money spent engaging in activities you…

You hear about people fighting cancer, battling alcoholism, waging war on their own crippling levels of apathy, but in the midst of the fray you might identify more with a battleground than someone who’s actually engaged in warfare. As someone in an ongoing turf war with depression—yeah, you stay in your corner!—I understand what it’s like to feel helpless. I’m familiar with the sense that no matter what I do, it won’t make a difference;…