Myst meditation
Reading time: 1-2 minutes
The Myst video game series is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year with a Kickstarter that collects the entire series in an awesome collector's edition.
I grew up with Myst, having played the original game maybe a couple of years after it originally came out. I remember asking my dad to take me to Best Buy the day the sequel, Riven came out a few years later in 1997. And I continued playing every game in the six-part series after that until the last title released in 2005. As I waited to play the final game back then, I put up a Myst fansite that covered the entire series.
My inspiration to later start writing fiction certainly came from the games, in part to the theme of writing in the game: the idea that you can create worlds with your writing, which in the game takes on a literal form. And as the crazy success of the Kickstarter shows, is an idea that still resonates with people.
But there's also another aspect that I think attracts me to keep playing the game from time to time (I've been playing a bit of the iOS version of a realtime remake of the original Myst along with Riven on my iPad Mini these last couple of weekends.) Over a year ago, I started meditating using the Headspace app on my iPhone. And I've come to realize that there's also a meditative quality to playing a Myst game. In the same way meditation gives you the opportunity to be alone with your thoughts, playing through a Myst game is similar as you explore worlds by yourself, gathering your thoughts and figuring out how to move forward.