Something very strange happened to me while playing DS recently. I woke up one day and it was a real struggle just playing this game. Every tap just seemed like I was fighting myself, struggling against the weight of my other worldly commitments. I felt like I was outside my body, looking at myself possessed by the spirit of a robot. I was routinely doing the hundred of actions I would normally do on DS on a daily basis for years, not knowing why. I looked to the black friday sales, the current event goals, the new tournament and the monthly reward dragon... and my mind's eye couldn't focus on anything. I gazed right through the meaningless type combinations, dragon names and recolours. I stared at the message I etched out in leaderboard trophies, and couldn't see how I could want to improve on it. I didn't have a good home for the last gold trophy I won, and there's only one meaningful spot for a crystal trophy, which I have already won. I value silver trophies the most because it takes careful planning and reading of your group to slide into the gap between 1st and 3rd in a frantic finish, but more silvers will simply obscure the clarity of the letters in my message.

I thought about the millions of food I had stockpiled... the bombs and dynamite unmined, the more than 600 dragon eggs in my storage, tens of thousands of essence, and 1000 adventure tickets... and it felt like nothing to me. It was like the infatuation in me had just died, decayed instantly and left a void with no trace of any motivation left behind. I must have watched Fruitful bounce along chasing that apple for a cumulative period of months of my life, and yet looking at the tiny kingdom in my hands all that effort felt fruitless.

I don't know if I'm going to quit this game. My love hates this game, but I don't want to grandly profess my new resolution, lest I disappoint them later. I quit once before, only to return with a vengeance just in time to get hooked on leaderboards when they were first introduced. I don't know how I will feel about this game in the future but at the moment, I'm logging in to just collect and send gold to my loyal neighbors. From that last time I stepped away, I know it's only a matter of time before I lose sense of any value in tens of thousands of gold, if there's nothing meaningful to spend it on. However this time it feels different. I thought about all my past neighbors that left and never came back... and wondered, "is this how they felt in their final moments as a dragon caretaker?"