Hey all,

Friday night I couldn’t sleep. I’d gone to bed about 1, but woke up around 2:30. My skin was crawling. I couldn’t tell if my apartment was too hot or too cold.

I decided to play a little bit of World of Warcraft, but instead of playing my tanky paladin I decided to play my 77 death knight. I got on, spent the nominal 15 minutes touching up my interface, and was on my way. After about an hour or so I went back to bed, read a bit, and finally fell asleep.

When I woke up in the morning, I decided to get my death knight to 80 since I made such good progress in the night. What followed was a marathon (read: binge) the likes of which I have not been a part of for years. I went from level 77 to 80 in one 24 hour period. I slayed dragons, ganked shamans, and captured run away chickens. I’m partly proud of my rapid and efficient leveling and partly embarrassed at being so stupid for playing so much in such a short period of time.

It is important to get the right nutrients during extended gaming sessions. Do like the undead do and eat lots of protein!

It’s not that I don’t like to game; on the contrary, I love to game, but the issue is that playing the same game becomes un-fun after a while. Even if I play games for most of a day, it’s highly rare for me to play the same game for more than a couple of hours. So playing the same game for half-a-day was very atypical.

I like to row when I’m not gaming. Like, a lot. I like it so much that I even rowed a marathon on a rowing machine a year and a half ago with my brother. It took over four hours to row the 42,195 meters. That is a long freaking time to be doing anything.

So my gaming experience yesterday was something along the lines of two and a half or three rowing marathons. How insane is that?

The worst part isn’t that I spent the time. It was Saturday; I didn’t have anything else to do; I should do with my time what I want. No, the worst part is that near the end it was frustrating for me. It got to the point where I wasn’t having enough fun to justify the time that I had spent. I was quite grumpy and just wanted to be done, but I didn’t want to stop as I’d set a goal for myself of hitting 80. My wrist was hurting, my eyes were tired and I was just generally in an un-fun mood. But I didn’t stop because I knew that I could hit my personal goal in another 3 hours, another 2 hours, etc. Why I set such an insane goal I don’t really know. In my head it went from, “Oh, I’ll hit 80 in the next week,” to “I need to hit 80 by the end of the weekend,” to “NO SLEEP UNTIL 80! GO GO GO!”

Luckily I hit 80 and earned the ability to go to bed. I basically ended up the like the dragon on the feature… just flopped into bed and instantly fell asleep from exhaustion.

Lesson learned: Powerleveling can make it less fun to complete a game’s content. Take it easy and it will generally be more enjoyable.

Cheers,

-S