Being a hero can be dull

Whoops. Where did the time go?

I bought and subscribed to City of Heroes for the UK launch, and have spent a substantial percentage of the last few weeks fighting bad guys in Paragon City. Unfortunately for me, the novelty has now started to wear off, exposing the game's stale innards. Like every other MMORPG, it's plagued by simplistic and repetitive gameplay, and success comes not from playing skilfully -- there is little skill involved -- but from devoting large amounts of time to the pursuit of levelling. It is rather fun, though, which for a time distracted me from the sensation of my brain slowly atrophying through the span of each session.

Negative as that may sound, there is actually much to be said in favour of CoH. Its gamer-friendly team mechanics, bustling urban setting, comic-inspired aesthetic, and regular content rollouts place it on a par with even the best of its competitors. And even though my superhero is undergoing a slight mid-life crisis, I'm not yet resigned to cancelling my account. My next billing date is in a couple of weeks, and I'm going to try to find a way to multitask the playing of CoH alongside some other, more mentally stimulating activity.

My first experiment will entail listening to an audiobook (or podcasts) while gaming. This sounds a little bizarre, but I think it might help. I would probably be a lot more enthusiastic about the game if instead of thinking at the end of a session that I spent a whole evening doing something fairly monotonous, I could say to myself "well, I got through 3 more chapters of A Short History of Nearly Everything... and I gained half a level."

Look for me in Paragon City... I'll be the superhero wearing white earphones and an expression of distant concentration.