Clive Thompon is not writing from the same world where I live.

Thirty-six hours? How in god’s name had I managed to spend almost four hours a day
inside this game? I should point out that this was not the only game
I’d been playing during that time. I’d also been hip-deep in BioShock and Space Giraffe,
so I’d been planted like a weed in front of my consoles for hours more.
This is a missing-time experience so vast one would normally require a
UFO abduction to achieve it.
So the question of the column, and possibly the question of my eternal
soul, is: Is this good thing? How much does it change the architecture
of your life to spend that much time playing games?
The dirty secret of gamers is that we wrestle with this dilemma all the
time. We’re often gripped by what I call “gamer regret” — a sudden,
horrifying sense of emptiness when we muse on all the other things we
could have done with our game time.

I
vaguely remember what it was like to spend a whole weekend playing a
video game. Last weekend I was up until 3 or 4 am Saturday and Sunday
mornings, because I knew that would be the only blocks of unbroken time
that I would have in order to solve some MT4 installation problems.
Last week I scheduled consultations with students in my basic comp
course, and while I thoroughly enjoy talking with each student, I
hadn’t realized just how quickly all my other work backed up. I sure
wish I had the time to lament spending too much time on video games!