You almost certainly don’t know that I was away for New Year. I understand your obliviousness, I still had posts going live, but I promise you, I was actually in a cabin in Wales enjoying myself. It took me 4 hours to get to said cabin in wales, and 5 hours or so to get back thanks to the wonder that is fucking snow.
This, however, is not what this article is about. I was gone for 3 days, plus another day afterwards for various reasons, plus the majority of the day before. That is four and a half days in which I didn’t play a single game. I’m serious, not a single game, not even on my iPod Touch, or my phone.
I spend most of my time playing games, or typing about playing games, or thinking about playing games, or even thinking about typing about playing games, yet I can bugger off for the majority of a week without so much as a twinge of withdrawal symptoms. Not only do I currently spend most of my time doing something related to games in some way, I have been doing so for roughly four years, and I played quite a lot before that four years begun, too.
My point? Well, my point is that gaming addiction is a large steaming pile of…silly (I’m reigning in the cussing to get my point across). It’s clearly obvious to anyone who isn’t a dim fudger that gaming is no more addictive than doing something else you enjoy, such as watching television or reading a book. Certain lawyers and the denizens of crazy land who continue to believe and, worse, actively pursue the idiocy of gaming being bad, whether literally addictive or encouraging violence or, I don’t know, training people for the army (…uh?) are so full of shitacki mushrooms that shoving them in an oven for 4 hours on gas mark 6 may well create a wonderful moron dinner.
Compared to ‘the box of reality television and the various other horrors that outweigh the good TV’ (that is TV’s full title, as designated by myself), gaming is being active – last time I checked I move my fingers when I play a game, am sat up and paying attention, whereas when people watch TV they’re generally sat (or lay) on a couch, slack-jawed and barely moving their chest as they breath.
If I can ‘survive’ almost a week away from gaming without turning into a whimpering wreck, everybody can. Gaming is far more beneficial than many other hobbies that people like to do – not only is it entertaining, it is genuinely engaging, more so than any film or book simply because you’re controlling what’s happening. You’re inside the story, the game, in a manner of speaking, which is roughly 273 times more effective than watching or reading about things happening elsewhere.
Still insisting on being senseless and female canining about gaming being bad for you? You can fornicate off, you buggering male genitals.
