Game Time Is Always Precious

Sometimes, just occasionally, I wish I was a student again.

Not for the £1.15 a pint of Carling in the Students’ Union bar, nor for the ability to wake up and be where I needed to be in less than fifteen minutes but for the amount of free time available. At the risk of sounding like the derisive adults I swore I would never turn into, I wish I had the technology available now back then. Specifically, I wish I had Xbox Live.

Back in the days when the PSone was just called the PlayStation and multiplayer was limited to the pool tables in the same bar as the criminally cheap beer, the outcome of my education would have been drastically downgraded. Whilst a wise man once said that the time you have is a bell jar and responsibility is a gas that expands to fill it, I think my gaming would have been a very dense cloud.

Bell Jar

Like most of us, my console usage is fit around my life rather than the other way around; it’s rare to find a modern triple A game that doesn’t require a big investment of large chunks of time. Don’t get me wrong, I can stretch a game on for an obscene length of time: I still haven’t finished Need For Speed: Most Wanted but at least the game offers small distances between meaningful milestones.

To be fair, I don’t expect or even wish games to adjust themselves to my lifestyle. I’d much rather, with impunity, be in a position to adjust my lifestyle to games. Yahtzee Crowshaw recently tweeted, “Kind of wish the summer games drought would hurry up and start. Three more games to play and I haven’t even finished Red Dead yet” but then he later tweeted, “Landlady kicking us out. New bathroom ahoy!”. Having recently moved house myself, I’m guessing he’ll also be fitting gaming around life with a slightly looser fit.

But the grass, I’m sure, is always greener on the other side. Whilst the student life’s free time was plentiful, the hole in the wall was asked for fivers far more often than any other denomination and the one flat pool table contained at least 20p worth of every cheap beer sold. The hour I spent in an evening this week playing Snoopy Flying Ace online with a collection of friends who are at least as busy as I am is the perfect example of why it is better to regard game time as precious no matter how much is spent.


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2 responses to “Game Time Is Always Precious”

  1. Celeste avatar
    Celeste

    I loved gaming at uni. Used to skip lectures to do it. So bad. So naughty. Probably why I enjoyed it so much.

  2. Anthony avatar
    Anthony

    There were always temptations at University, I just wish they had all been as accessible and as simple as gaming. I think my gamerscore would be at least twice what it is now if I’d started in my first year.

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