/blogged

James forwarded me this link from Wired: an article about so-called 'Gamer regret,'-- "a sudden, horrifying sense of emptiness when we muse on all the other things we could have done with our game time." Sadist that I am, I checked my time played for my three main Warcraft characters and added it all together with a little MATH! (I have a couple of other alternate characters, but I hardly ever play them, and they're low-level so I can't have committed much time to them.) The result: 30 days, 21 hours. That means that in the year (or so) I've been playing Warcraft, I've spent a month in-world. That's two hours a day. Yeah. Glad I could make you feel better about your own, pathetic life.

The thing is, I feel like I am finally at a point where I can play without losing myself in it--I have grown capable, finally, of stopping when I've had enough, of resisting when I have other things to do, of recognizing when the experience is making me less happy instead of more happy. These days I clock maybe 6 or 7 hours a week--more humane, certainly. (24 of those 30 days were getting my main character to 60, and I have barely played with her for 3 months or more since she got there and I completely lost interest in her.) But there was definitely a time when I didn't have that ability to be constructive. But this is the way I consume everything, obsessively, so I don't know why it continues to surprise me.