How do you personally make time for gaming?

[Exhuminator]

@MrPopo
You sir are a man dedicated, I give you that.

[Ack]

I am skeptical because a lot of the games I see dsh beat aren't cheevo compatible?

Nonsense, you can eat Cheetos while playing any game. Why, Dave's controllers are all neon orange for a reason.

[MrPopo]

@MrPopo
You sir are a man dedicated, I give you that.

When I was a kid growing up, my dream was to make enough money to play video games all the time.

I've achieved that dream. It's awesome.

[Exhuminator]

I've achieved that dream. It's awesome.

[Ack]

@MrPopo
You sir are a man dedicated, I give you that.

When I was a kid growing up, my dream was to make enough money to play video games all the time.

I've achieved that dream. It's awesome.

The problem with achieving your dreams is that you then have nothing better to do. At this point I've worked several of my dream jobs. I'm having to come up with new dreams.

[Exhuminator]

Nothing is more boring than having everything you ever wanted.

[Ack]

Nothing is more boring than having everything you ever wanted.

It's true. I'm 30. I've been paid to play video games, write about video games, analyze the news, and watch cartoons. I may change careers in the next few years and write for television, and I write short stories on the side(and have written one movie novelization) and may one day get paid for that. At the rate I'm going, I'll be out of dream jobs by the time I'm 40.

...most of my dreams involve writing.

[Key-Glyph]

Ooh, interesting topic!

I'm married, live in an apartment, and am mamma cat to one ten-year-old shorthair. Over the past six years my workweek hours have varied in different jobs from 40+ to 38 to 32, and now that I'm a part-time graduate student, I'm clocking in with 15+. I technically have two weekdays on which I'm not scheduled to commute to campus, but one of my jobs carries with it the possibility that I will be asked to come in on any given day, for any given time. I also do volunteer work for a podcast.

My husband and I are both gamers, so most nights we settle on the couch together while one or the other plays. It's just one of the things we do together, and have always done -- the other big one being reading. We don't watch TV together very much because we don't have cable, and also because I have an incredibly low threshold for violence; a lot of the shows my husband watches are what we call "Key-unfriendly," so he catches up with them while I'm at my night classes or working on podcasts or homework. Since we've gotten Hulu we'll collaborate on a few Star Trek episodes a week at most, and maybe an episode of Chopped.

I love to observe people playing video games almost as much as I like to play them myself, and as an added bonus my husband typically plays "new" stuff (read: XBox 360 ), so I happily get to "do research" on lots of titles I'd never pick up on my own. Because of this I consider his gaming time to be mine as well, in a way.

As far as chores, I'm in charge of the cleaning, and my husband -- who works full-time -- is in charge of the grocery shopping and cooking. Cleaning can take up several hours a week, but I typically get the major stuff done in full-afternoon bursts, leaving the evening open if I don't have school, homework, or podcast obligations.

That said, I've felt like I've had little free time since starting graduate school two years ago, and yet I'm playing games frequently. I don't know if I'm playing them more than ever, or just playing them more deliberately and purposefully than ever. A lot of days I have this narrative in my head of "It's 11 PM and I haven't been able to do anything for my own enjoyment yet, so I am going to stay up until 2 AM playing a game that makes me happy, damn it." I've also almost entirely stopped reading for pleasure this semester (I'm just too burnt out), which is adding to the vidya time.

An interesting twist in all of this is that I get ill frequently, and when that happens I'm often laid out (literally, on the couch or bed) for an entire day or more. The two things I can do without making the situation worse are, in an incredible stroke of luck, reading books and playing video games. This means I'm often in the situation where all other plans for the day become impossible except for gaming, which becomes a distracting savior of sorts. I also often find myself unable to sleep because of this, and again, video games become a happy diversion. Many an hour has been sunk into an RPG in this way. Thank goodness for the Nintendo DS and its adjustable backlight.

And yes, I do most of my gaming in the late evening and wee morning hours, and like jmustang, I frequently sacrifice sleep time to do so.

[Jmustang1968]

Which podcast do you help with Key-Glyph?

[Key-Glyph]

Which podcast do you help with Key-Glyph?

The Legacy Music Hour, which features 8-bit and 16-bit video game music. The two hosts used to put together an episode every week where they played tracks and discussed them, but they've cut back to one a month. We pad those releases every other week by publishing music-only "mixtapes" of their past episodes' playlists, which I put together for them.

It's a lot of fun, and Brent and Rob are the best.