femalegamer

Where do you draw the line between too much gaming and not enough life? This is a question I’ve wrestled with over the past 3.5 years (about the time my husband and I got hooked on World of Warcraft). For months on end, I wouldn’t think anything of spending at least 70 hours a week playing the game. Get up, go to work, come home, play until midnight. Friday, play until 2 a.m. or later. Saturday and Sunday, play from the time we awoke to the time we finally crashed at night. My husband, who worked at home, put in even more hours than I did. He never shirked his responsibilities, but he was able to work playing into his schedule more often than not.

It didn’t matter to me since we were playing together - quality couple time.

Every once and a while though, a nagging little thought would enter my mind, “You’re wasting your life away, you need to get out of the house.” It would gnaw away at me until I became a raging nightmare to my husband and he acquiesced. Grudgingly, he’d also put the keyboard down and we’d go out for a few nights in a row: see a move, socialize with friends who had all but forgotten about us, go out for a drink, dinner, even a walk.

Occasionally, we’d both have our fill and take a few weeks off. They were nice and we both appreciated spending our time in the real world. But, ultimately, we’d miss the game and go back. A few months back, we went through one of those periods… the weather was starting to get nice and it felt good to be outside of the house. Right around the time we were getting ready to settle back in with the game, my husband’s computer decided it had its fill of life and met its microchip maker in the sky. We were both furious - we wanted to play, but we were being kept from it. We had to, gasp, find other ways to occupy our time. It’s one thing when we choose to do it, but when it is foisted on us it is totally different.

Surprisingly though, the time it took for him to get a new computer and have it shipped to us was a good thing. I think both of us realized how much life had to offer (not that we really didn’t know, we just needed a swift kick as a reminder). We’ve gotten better at trying to balance our gaming time vs. our “real life” time. There’s too much to miss out on when you’re on your computer seven days a week.

We’re not going to be young forever (okay, at this point neither of us is that young anyway), we don’t want to look back 20 years from now and realize we squandered several years of our lives (what really can be the best years of our lives - semi-young, fairly newly married, couple life with just the average responsibilities and the freedom of not quite yet having children).

Although I know we will be prone to becoming addicted again (Wrath of the Lich King is going to be coming out after all), I’d like to think we’ve learned that there is more to living life than just pixellated epic weapons and “gaming cred.”

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