For the past several weeks, I’ve been playing Diablo 2 for an average of 8-10 hours a day, broken up into two and sometimes three sessions, with breaks about every half hour to an hour, plenty of water to keep hydrated, lots of walking in between missions, listening to my favorite Press Keys, Herbie Hancock, Dave Brubeck or Charles Lloyd album as I whip the Diablo levels into a total frenzy with my combination punch — traps plus fire bombs from my trapper assassin and ravens, wolves and blasts of arctic air from my elemental druid.

The point is, when in combat, don’t dawdle. Pour it on as fast and as heavy as you can, with great efficiency and fervor, then dodge the return fire and do it again until nothing moves and all is quiet on the Western Front. In short, rain down death and destruction like some Hindu Gods I could mention, then have a sip of tea and do it again.

Yes, death and destruction. If you’re going to get into the God Business, you can’t be squeamish about what happens when a universe runs down from Big Bang to Very Very Dark and Quiet. There’s a lot of death and destruction in the normal course of events. Hundreds of micro-organisms die every year, and you wouldn’t believe the statistics in the vegetable kingdom.

So I’m knocking about in various modes, a wide variety of character classes, an even wider spread of character levels from level 1 to level 61, my highest ranking char in hardcore in this most recent run of ladder characters, although I have dozens more in non-ladder, going all the way back to the very first year of Diablo 2, about fifteen years ago, by my admittedly shaky reckoning — maybe 20 years, could be, during the course of which I’ve put in several thousands of hours of experimental game play, with the idea in mind of developing a course of self-study and self-mastery that used gaming as a basis, and that’s what I’m presenting now. Continue reading →