I sat, on my couch, feeling disappointed. I passed into coverage and ran into blitzes, I couldn’t convert on 3rd down and my defense had more holes than the oldest pair of socks in my drawer. I was 15 minutes in and down 24 points.
I sat, less than halfway through my first game of Madden, losing by four scores, and I pondered what I had gotten myself into. I sat, a disheveled mess in a baggy t-shirt and baggy white basketball shorts on my school-provided couch. All I could ask myself was “how can you do this?” “Twenty-three and a half more hours?”
——–
I wouldn’t call myself athletic, but I’m closer to that than a couch potato. I’m active. I’m involved in the theatre and I’m a sports writer. I’ll walk before I drive if I can. I grew up playing baseball and football and moving around on a stage. I’ve never been stagnant and I’ve never stared at a television for 24 straight hours.
When I was 8, my mom bought me and my two brothers a Nintendo 64 for Christmas. Naturally, we were excited. My older brother gravitated towards action games, shooting games and the like. I played Madden 2001, Ken Griffey Jr.’s Slugfest and Mario Tennis. My little brother played whatever we told him he was going to play.
My mom didn’t like what video games did to us. She read articles aloud at dinner about the effects electronics could have on an adolescent’s brain. She brought the evil into our house and she began to show that she could take it away. She hid the systems unless we’d done our homework, she’d allot minutes of video game time based on how much yard work we’d done. She began to use our interest to her advantage.
The longest I ever played video games before was maybe four hours. I enjoyed them but I wasn’t someone who could just sit down and game. I have friends, many friends, who can do this. They can sit down at one end of an evening and beat up bad guys until the sun rises. Frankly, I’ve never admired this about anyone. “How can you be so close-minded to the world around you?” I thought.
I think it was a mixture of things that pushed me to this experiment. I wanted to see how my brain and body would react. Would my mom’s crazy rants be correct? Would my mind really turn to mush? And I wanted to try out a different lifestyle. Would I regret the time I wasted? Would I simply shut off and finally relax? (Something I haven’t really done in months.)
I was going to play video games for 24 straight hours. I was going to sit and game and turn my cerebral cortex into applesauce.
———
Hour 1
I laid down the ground rules for myself earlier in the day. I get as many bathroom breaks as I want. I eat while I play. I talk while I play. I use the computer while I play. I get two 15 minute breaks. That’s it. I text my friends to come over whenever and I begin with a simple game of Madden ’11 on my friend Daniel’s Playstation 3, (He’s lent it to me so I don’t have to bear 24 hours on my original Xbox, which happens to be the most modern video game console I own.)
I begin my expedition at 11:57 p.m. on a Friday night. My friends think I’m an idiot for trying to stay awake for 36ish hours, but I decide to do it this way, so when I finish it’ll be midnight on Saturday night. I can then go straight to bed and sleep until next year.
As mentioned earlier, I’m dominated by the computer for the first half of my first game and I head into halftime down 24-7. Daniel comes over as my first guest as I begin the second half, and he suggests that I check the difficulty. I do, and it’s set to the hardest possible setting. I bring it down a few notches to give myself a fighting chance but still lose by 10. Daniel puts in a frozen pizza. I sit. I set up my first multiplayer game of the evening. I lose.
Hours 2-6
I set up a video blog on my computer for my excursion. Every two hours, I record a video of myself talking about the experience and how I feel for maybe 45 seconds. I feel like each two hour period is going by faster than the last. We play seven minute NCAA Football quarters and the games last close to an hour each.
I’m surprisingly not really bored yet. I’ve got a plethora of sports games to choose from – NHL, NBA, NFL, NCAA, MLB. I’m not winning very much; my win/loss record stands at 14-18.
A few more friends have come back from a night of partying and they dance and putz around my static self. I like it, it’s five in the morning and I’m surrounded by drunk people while I play hockey and drink coffee. Life is still fun, the sun’s going to come up soon; I can see glimpses of light through my window. I’m jacked up on Mountain Dew, scenery and thoughts of triumph.
Hours 7-12
I switch from sports games, which might be the biggest mistake I make. My buddy Greg is giving me talk about how he can bring over his Nintendo Wii and we can play “real” games. It’s eight in the morning, the sun is up and he’s been up with me through the night. During our last match of NCAA, I went to the bathroom and when I got out he was asleep, controller in hand and sitting up. I woke him and we finished the 2nd half. To play what he wants is the least I can do.
We agree, after some brief bickering, that we’ll play Mario Party, a board game style game that takes forever. “The longer the better” I say, and everyone agrees. It’s nice to have people as invested in this as I am.
——–
I’m starting to get incredibly frustrated.
“I win again!” says Brian, my little brother in my fraternity.
“Well, you’ve f***ing been playing this game for weeks! Of course you win!” I yell.
Mario Party is made up of mini-games that involve less skill than experience and more button mashing than intelligence. I lose often, but at the end I catch a few breaks. I’ve been playing for eight straight hours and I finally feel my first true triumph. I jump around and gloat and after playing this board game wannabe for almost two hours, I win by a narrow margin. I guess it feels good. I’m unsure whether I’m happy that I won or that it’s over. I sit back down. They want to play again. “Hell no.” I say, “Who’s up for some more hockey?”
I have a headache.
Hours 12-16
Honestly, I’m spent. I eat pasta and I can barely even enjoy it. I’m so hungry and so tired and I feel nauseous. My stomach hurts and feels queasy and I’ve had a headache for five hours. I’m well into hour 14. I’ve given up keeping track of my wins and losses. The outcome doesn’t really matter anymore. I’ve gotten into a horrible habit of checking the clock after each game (“making sure I don’t have to do a video entry”). Time has stopped. I go to the bathroom and I come out. “I literally forgot how to s***,” I text Daniel. “hahahahah” is the response.
I’m angry at everything. I don’t know how anyone can do anything that involves winning and losing for this long. It’s such a struggle with your mind.
I’m playing NCAA Football ’12 with my roommate KJ and my controller starts malfunctioning. I can’t run the ball because every time I hand the ball off, a button that I’m not pressing causes the halfback to pump fake a pass then hurdle. By the time he’s done with this semi-tribal dance move, he’s hit in the backfield for a loss of about nine. I have to pass for an entire game. I’m getting sacked and intercepted and I suck. I somehow manage a comeback and I’m ahead by four points with seven seconds left in the game. Last play of the game, he has the ball on his own 17. He throws for an 83-yard touchdown. I picked the wrong play and I don’t even care. I’m not surprised. I just want to die.
I’ve started to question the meaning of life. Why, I ask Greg, should I even be allowed on this earth? How can anything be invented that has the potential to waste away a human’s life? Even if the medical effects on the brain aren’t true, the effects these machines can have on your motivation and will to live are extraordinary. I am literally sitting on my couch wondering how I can waste an entire day and night of my life on this. You only get so many hours and I’m flushing 24 of them. I’m sad and I’m introspective and I pity the souls that can go through life, even if it’s not with video games – if it’s with anything that doesn’t truly fulfill you, and just waste away.
Hour 19
My girlfriend, Janet, calls and I talk as I play.
“Hey you, how’s it going?” she asks.
“It’s alright.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like s***.”
“Who all is there?”
“No one.”
We talk for a few minutes and we discuss the pros and cons of throwing in the towel. I sit, alone in my dorm room with a horrible headache and an even worse loneliness. All my friends have left to see a senior showcase or to perform and I’ve got five more hours. I envisioned the final eight hours to be a piece of cake, it’s the home-stretch.
On the plus side, if I go to bed now, it shows the extreme effect these games had on my body and mind. Also, I could stop physically hurting myself and I could sleep. On the minus side, I would fail. And I’m sure I would hear about it and be ashamed of myself.
I make my decision and call my friend Kyle who’s been monitoring my situation closely. “I’m giving up,” I mutter.
“Well,” he says harshly. “If anything later in life happens where you had an ultimate goal and didn’t fulfill it… You can always look back on this and see where that trend started.”
It’s time for my final blog entry.
“I played a lot of games tonight and I watched the sun come up,” I say to my computer and to my empty room. “But I didn’t really do anything. I feel like a day of my life just went away. And I’m never going to get it back. It’s pretty weird.”
I shower, turn off the TV, and go to sleep.
————
Epilogue- 15 hours later
I wake up. The weirdest and most disturbing part of this experiment is that after I wake up and feel physically better, I don’t really feel any animosity towards the video game industry. I’m angry and upset still. But at myself.
I haven’t done any homework and I can’t get the whole “wasted my life” thing out of my head. How can you do something that wasn’t satisfying at all for 19 hours, something that helps waste away millions of people’s lives and still feel indifferent about it? I don’t know but I do.
I head over to Kyle’s a couple hours later and we watch some football. I stay for a while, sit for a while, having done nothing for almost three days straight. I get up to leave and he asks if I want to play a game of NHL with him on Xbox… “Just one,” I reply.
We play two and I win them both. But I leave so unsatisfied.