Press Start

With the weekend approaching, it would be an appropriate time to explain a bit with how my weekends usually pan out.  You hear lots of gamers out there, married or in a serious relationship (read: where you don’t ditch the girl because Team Fortress 2 was released), are able to have few hours long gaming sessions.  I personally have never truly understood how that can possibly occur. 

 

To clarify, I don’t have kids, nor do I participate regularly in team sports (I do play squash with my good friend twice a week) so I should technically have lots of free time to play games.  But somehow it is never seems like I can get more than 30 minutes of gaming in.  I do take care of chores at home, such as doing my part in cooking, cleaning, and playing with the dog (he’s high energy!) but the other part, I think, is my own habit of filling up my evenings with other frivolous things.  I have a routine.  I get home and prepare dinner/eat/clean up.  Then I proceed to read all the news in tech and games before I feel relaxed.  During this time, I’m also interacting with my wife, my dog, and all other manner of interruptions.  So what ends up happening is 9:30PM rolls around and I have yet to play one second of any game. 

 

After speaking to some of my other “attached” friends, I believe they do their gaming times in the late evening, when their spouses or significant others have gone to bed.  This is an option but my home office (funny how we call it that when we do maybe 1% of our work there) is upstairs so noise levels are an issue.  Our big screen TV is in the bonus room, which is on a direct sound path to the bedroom.  This choice in positioning was a mutual decision but it’s something I’m beginning to think may not be a permanent solution. 

 

With Autumn here and Winter in Canada being pretty cold, I should be able to stay in for more evenings and be better off playing some games than doing yard work.  But for this weekend, I am going to try something new.  I will vow to stick to my schedules, and allow for at least 3 hours of pure gaming, with minimum 1 hour intervals.  Let’s see how that goes shall we?