The pall of age is upon me and my sinews have withered grievously

I hurt my back.

On Monday I was vacuuming and doing the area around the closet in Laila's room when I bent down a bit to get behind the door and felt a sharp pain in my back. I levered myself back up to vertical using the vacuum, told Laila that everything was fine, and tried to do the same to sashagee when she came to see what was going on but she was having none of it. She told me to sit down with some ice on my back, ignored my protests, and proceeded to finish up the vacuuming. Laila came over and sat on my lap--fortunately I wasn't so injured that she couldn't do that--and sashagee handled mostly getting her ready for bed. She said she would do all the bedtime singing and stories, too, but I wasn't going to miss bedtime, and sitting seiza wasn't too bad, so I came in and sat that way and went out at the end and took it easy. When I woke up the next morning it still hurt but not as much, and sashagee put an icy-hot patch on my back after my shower and I was even able to pick up Laila when she asked "Hold you?" I took it easy yesterday, working from home, and today I was able to go back into the office.

I'm lucky. My back is still sore, and I don't have perfect range of movement, but I was able to take a full shower in the standing shower and wipe down all the walls afterwards as long as I knelt down to get the bottom instead of bending over. As I was talking about it to sashagee I described my work as a "soft hands office job" and it's true, but it's meant that even over age 40 my body is still in very good condition. People repeatedly think I'm 5-10 years younger than I actually am, and that helped me bounce back.

But it's a warning that I need to be careful.

The flaw in survival games

Was thinking lately about the problems I have with so many survival games and I realized that it comes down to a lack of being punished by the indifferent gods.

Okay, so like I wrote about in my recent gameing update, I've been playing Project Zomboid. It's a lot of fun, but it has a lot of limitations, and I've had some of the veil pulled back in how the game's simulation actually works and now I can't unsee it. For example, by default, zombies sort themselves into small groups that are roughly equidistant from each other, and they'll migrate to nearby areas with no zombies. But, crucially, they'll only migrate the equivalent of a few hundred meters, because the only area that's simulated is the area that far around the character. There's a mod called Wandering Zombies that cause zombies to wander around a bit more, and it does mean I need to be a bit more careful about stragglers and zombies having shown up near houses I've cleared, but it still can't cause zombies to wander too far away. The giant horde coming toward the protagonists' safehouse, one of the staple tropes of zombie fiction, is impossible in Project Zomboid because there are no far-away horde movement mechanics. If you clear out the area near your base, base defenses are useless because no zombie will ever find you.

Zomboid gets around this by just having zombies respawn, which is pretty gamey in a game that tries hard for verisimilitude.

Cataclysm has similar problems. It also only simulates the area near the player, but while it does have horde mechanics, the area it simulates is small enough that it's very possible if you have a large enough base that hordes would appear on the edge of the simulated area which could be inside your defenses. To deal with this, hordes were changed to prefer roads and city centers, but that leads to the same problem as Zomboid, where if you build your base away from a zombie hotspot--the obvious thing to do--you can farm and play post-apocalyptic Stardew Valley without a care. In a game about the inevitable decline of the world, nothing dangerous will come to you unless you go seek it out.

Unreal World has a similar but different problem, which is that the early game is a brutal struggle for survival as you try to carve a homestead out of the unforgiving wilderness but once you do, once you have a small cabin and food stored in your food cellar for the winter and some traps set out for animals, you usually wonder "Well...now what do I do?" and stop playing. I've done that several times and never actually played through winter because I knew I would survive and it would take months of the exact same gameplay to get there. I didn't have to worry about any trouble unless I made it for myself.

And that's my problem. City-builders are very good about providing unexpected challenges that you need to have the resilience to beat, like Timberborn's droughts and Badtide or SimCity's disasters, but a lot of survival games don't seem to have anything like that even when it would be appropriate. Now, I know that some of this is because these are games and if you sow an entire field and it all dies to drought, you're just going to quit the game rather than try to recover from it the way that our ancestors did. But it's very weird to me in a game that's about the zombie apocalypse you can avoid most of the tropes that are central to zombie apocalypse fiction. Zomboid doesn't have NPCs (they've been promising them for 12 years...), which means there's no raiders, there's no person who joins the group while hiding a bite, there's no conflict over who has to do what jobs. It has no wandering hordes so bases are totally safe. Cataclysm has multiple interdimensional invaders fighting over the Earth, except none of them actually fight unless they happen to spawn near each other and you can likewise just ignore most of them unless you deliberately seek out trouble. Once you've brought in one harvest, you've won the game.

I keep looking at Vintage Story for its robust survival mechanics but that has an entirely separate thing I don't like (it keeps the Minecraft-like system of mobs just spawning in from thin air), so who knows.