It occurred to me today that the world of gaming has changed, and that gaming has changed our world.

I don’t know when I’ll end up dropping this post, but regardless of when it happens, I should say that I literally just left my bedroom five minutes ago because my wife and my daughter were gaming in there and I came down to my kitchen to get some coffee.

Now, rewind thirty years, and my brother and I were involved in a strategic campaign to get our father to break down and buy us a Nintendo Entertainment System. We wanted one for the same silly reasons that any kids want anything: all of our friends were getting them, all of the commercials said we should have one, etc., etc.. You get the idea. We eventually wore him down and then, let the games begin!

We set it up in a communal room in the house, to keep the sibling rivalry to a minimum, and my gaming interests began to take hold. To be honest, even before that, I felt I was a gamer. Dig Dug and Pitfall on the Atari were great, but they left a little to be desired. I couldn’t possibly tell you how many hours I sat in front of that NES, beating games we’d bought, beating games we’d rented from the video store, working on beating games that were so difficult as to be ultimately frustrating. I even spent hours working on the time it took me to beat Super Mario. To this day, I am still able to beat Super Mario in under fifteen minutes. Stop by some time, I’ll show you on my Wii.

Since those days, I’ve owned many different video games, video game systems, accessories, etc. In college, I was a PC gamer, when network gaming was just getting started. A college roommate and I punched a small hole through the drywall that separated the bedrooms in our apartment so we could play Command & Conquer: Red Alert against each other on a P2P connection (part of the reason that we never got our security deposit back). PC gaming in those days often involved four or five or eight CD sets that you would play through, because video-quality graphics take up a lot of space and those CDs only hold so much data.

Then, as an adult, I’ve conned my wife into letting me buy video game consoles (for the kids, of course), and the gaming interests have continued to have a hold in my life. I remember playing Guitar Hero on the PlayStation 2 while my son, six or seven years old at the time, watching at my side. His favorite song on Guitar Hero, and therefore the most requested hit in my repertoire, was a Joan Jett classic, “I Love Rock and Roll”.

Santa bought an X-Box One for the kids a couple of Christmases ago and now I have been loving Fall-Out 4 and Forza and others, as well. My son, soon to be sixteen, has followed in his father’s footsteps, and he and I have often booted each other off of the X-Box.

Speaking of my wife (the first full paragraph of this post was about my wife), when we first met, she was not a gamer. Not in any sense of the modern term. She thought video games were a waste of time and that I was wasting my time playing them. I did it when she wasn’t around, back when we were dating, and tended not to bring it up in conversation when we were together –> avoid the touchy subjects.

So, the experience of leaving my bedroom several minutes ago because she was gaming and I wanted to get some coffee occurred to me as somewhat odd.

How times have changed.

And speaking of times a-changin’, I haven’t been gaming much, just recently. I’ve been finding other things to do. Other things that I am actually enjoying more, and that seem to be a bit more fruitful. Like, for example, working on my writing.

Now, don’t get me wrong –> my wife has not become the gaming zombie that I used to be, sitting in front of that NES decades ago for hours on end. Additionally, this is also probably the time for me to mention that I still waste way too much time on Sudoku puzzles (if you haven’t heard of my Sudoku addiction, check out PART ONE & PART TWO of that particular story). And, I get pulled into Twitter too often. And I love me some Notre Dame football.

You get the idea –> we all seem to have our distractions. In fact, this is a topic that I think I have blogged on before (I was going to try to link in some of those other posts, but then I got distracted).

But gaming has been a particularly powerful distraction in my life for a very long time, and judging by what’s going on in my bedroom right now, it’s influence is still alive and well in our society. Thinking about the way that gaming has evolved throughout its history, from being a “nerd” activity to being something that many more people are involved in, the distraction has become real for a lot of people. And, while I don’t want to condemn anyone (because I’d be one of the greatest of the sinners, trust me), I do wonder what I could have accomplished over the years, over the decades, if I had all of that time back.

Research shows that the average gamer spends about seven hours a week on gaming. That’s 10,920 hours that I’ve lost since I begged my dad for an NES.

Especially mobile device gaming. My wife is still not a big fan of console gaming (although she’s had plenty of opportunities in our house, trust me), but mobile device gaming is what has her consumed at the moment. She likes to play canasta and euchre and various word games and matching tile games. Add to that list Candy Crush and Fruit Ninja and Flappy Bird and Pokemon Go! and you start to get the idea. The number of gamers grows higher and higher.

And this is only one of the multiple distractions that we face as a society.

So, what’s my point?

Well, I guess it’s the hypocrisy of the thing. Because, eventually, when these gamers run out of time to do what they need to do because they were playing games instead, that’s hypocrisy. Or, when they look around at the world, dissatisfied with the way things are, wanting change, that’s hypocrisy. Or, when they’re broke and can’t afford the utility bills but they’ve spent a chunk of money on in-app purchases to get them to the next level of their game, that’s hypocrisy.

Additionally, if you’ll allow me to get a little “conspiracy theory crazy” for a minute: couldn’t it be that gaming (or the entertainment industry or the fast food industry or the advertising industry or the social media machine) is being used by powers who seek our docile dormancy? You know what we’re not doing when we’re playing games? Rocking the boat. Improving ourselves and our world. Organizing ourselves to initiate the changes that are long overdue.

At the very least, we can question what it is that we do with our time. Perhaps the greatest hypocrisy is saying that we want something (more time, better fitness, a healthier bank account) but our actions suggest otherwise.