22,000 Hours of Gaming
By: Jan Olsen
Tags: Personal Growth, Growing Up, Life Lessons, Gaming, Personal Development

Here’s what I’ve learned

Since I got my Nintendo 64 for Christmas in 1998 I’ve been playing an average of between 2–4 hours per day.

Where it all began for me!

I remember the first and only Christmas that I received a gaming console as clear as day. It was Christmas Eve 1998, and my parents and grandparents had gone out together and bought me and my sister each our Nintendo 64. This marked the beginning of my relationship with gaming.

The first game that I ever got was Mario 64, which definitely is not a bad place to begin playing games looking back!

I would play Mario 64 for 30 minutes every night with my dad, and we would try to get one star every day until we completed the whole game. You can imagine it took some time to get through it, but we finally did after many months of trying, and it was amazing. I remember spending so much time running up the never-ending stairs towards the end of the game thinking that if I run for long enough, I would eventually get to the top. It didn’t work that way, and I found out days later that I had to continue getting stars in order to reach the end of the stairs. All the experiences I had and the fondness I created made me more interested in checking out other games as I got older. Thinking back at it it was so much fun playing Mario with my dad, as he provided the knowledge and skills that I didn’t have as a six or seven year old.

Beneficial or harmful?

Whether it’s been beneficial or harmful is a question that I had to ask myself many times. How many hours of gaming is bad for you, and how many hours is ok? I feel like video games have probably been more helpful to me than harmful. The reason why I say that is because my personality is more introverted, and as an introvert I need more time alone to relax, and time to choose whether or not I should be social. I realized that video games were a good way to be social on my own terms.

World of Warcraft gave me an amazing chance to be social on my own terms.

“I feel like video games have probably been more helpful to me than harmful.”

In high school I had pretty bad grades. There were a few exceptions, and those exceptions were English, social science, and other language classes. In most other classes I had trouble keeping up, and I was also having trouble with people bullying me, which also made me less motivated to continue.

Bullying and gaming

Being bullied might have been a factor that made me play more games, but it is definitely not the only reason why I was playing so much. I believe that has to do with my personality. As an introvert I recharge my energy by being alone. Having some alone time helps me recharge my batteries at the end of a busy day, and then I can go out and be social the next day like anyone else. Although many people look at introverts as shy and closed off people this is not true, we simply need some time alone to recharge as opposed to extroverts who recharge by being social.

Although I was an introvert and probably would’ve played as much as I did anyway, bullying is never good for any social aspect of a child’s life or teenagers life, and it might change a person forever. It definitely changed me as a person, but I chose to use the negative in my past as fuel to become more positive, which in turn has improved my life for the better.

“You will never make new friends if you don’t go looking for them.”

No matter how many times my parents told me that I would get square eyes from playing too many games they could not pull me away from my Nintendo or computer. It didn’t matter how much they told me that I couldn’t play for more than one or two hours per day, I still tried to find ways to have as much time as I could with my favorite video games. The reason being that I fell in love with games and gaming in general. Already in elementary school I realized that I was having more fun on my own or with some of my friends playing games then I was having outside. I enjoyed games more than sports and any other activities. At some points, it was probably an addiction, and I remember my mom telling me “You will never make new friends if you don’t go looking for them.” As an adult I realize how much this makes sense, but back then it didn’t matter. The fun I was having with games outweighed most other things in life.

Telling me that my eyes would become square didn’t make me change my mind.

Is 22,000 hours even that long?

When I think about it 22,000 hours of games doesn’t seem like that much to me. This might sound crazy to some people, but to me an average of 2 to 4 hours per day it’s not that much, because I know people who spend that much time reading newspapers and books, or doing other activities like knitting or wood crafting. It’s not that I look down on these hobbies as less than what I personally enjoy. It’s more about knowing that what I love is what I spend my time doing, and back then I did it for as long as I could, which again helped me improve my life in many ways up until today.

One good example of how games helped me improve my life is my English skill. I probably wouldn’t be at the level that I am in English today if it wasn’t for gaming. Gaming helped me open up as a person at a very young age, and it helped me discover the world way younger than people in the past would have discovered it at. When I started high school my English level was pretty average, and I wasn’t doing well in reading or writing. For example, I have written in a previous article that World of Warcraft probably helped me learn way more, and way better than many of my high school classes. It has also given me a better understanding of English as a language than I would have had if I had only followed the books that I was given in school. World of Warcraft was new back then, and as an MMO it helped me meet people from all around the world and talk to them, trade and cooperate from my bedroom, which is unlike anything anyone has ever been able to do ever in history before. In that way I was very lucky that I was able to experience the birth of mainstream MMO games in 2004–2005.

Playing games from a young age probably also helped me with my math skills, which was, to put it simply: terrible. From eighth grade I was probably one semester behind everyone else in my class in math, and at one point I was even put in a special needs class in order to help me with improving my math skill. Through trading with other people directly in WoW I learned how to haggle, negotiate, and list items in the auction house. To make money in-game this way I had to know what items were worth and how to list them at the correct price, which demanded some calculating. Over time this helped me improve greatly.

Collaboration is key

Through games I was able to learn math and English in a fun way where I could collaborate with other people, people who also found it interesting to meet and converse with someone that wasn’t from the same place as themselves. This helped us grow as people and learn how to work in teams, which became an important skill as I got older.

One of the negative things of playing so many games when I was younger was that a lot of my friends were very active physically, and I was not, which led to me drifting away from some of them socially. They were playing football, or were out playing with each other, which I missed out on many times. I thought it was fun as well but I enjoyed gaming way more. Especially during the last years of high school I remember my friends coming over to visit me. I have been up until 3 or 4 AM the night before, and I was still sleeping at 2 or 3 PM in the day when they came knocking on my door. It’s funny to think about now, but at the same time it was also a warning sign that I was overdoing it. It also gave me a bad feeling about missing out on the whole day. Waking up at 3 PM never gives me a positive feeling, no matter how old I am. During those days I was probably playing 10 or 12 hours per day, which obviously is not healthy for anyone.

My fascination with gaming led me to neglect sports. Even though I didn’t play much football, I was able to collaborate with friends online.

Signs of addiction

Some days when I was younger my parents told me that I couldn’t play anymore. Some of those times would lead me to go spend my own money at an internet café, actually the only Internet café we had in my town, which cost about six dollars per hour to borrow a computer. As a young guy in high school that was a lot of money that I would happily spend in order to keep playing. This, too, is probably a good sign of gaming addiction.

Back when I was younger I had a lot of time to play games every day, and as long as I made sure that my homework was done, and all the chores in the house was taken care of I could sit down and relax and enter another dimension. I could meet people from Scotland, Belgium, Austria, Germany, and all over the world, and I got to know many of them very well. They became pretty much as good friends as my real life friends.

22,000 hours is equal to four hours every day for the past 15 years. That’s an average, so during some periods of time I played less than that, and during some periods of time I played more, but on average I probably spent four hours per day gaming since I was 12 or 13 years old. Today this is probably not that unusual, but back then the internet and gaming as a medium was still young. World of Warcraft was only a few years old, and I was in the prime age to pick it up as it was a game that was already big back then, and it would go on to make a huge impact on my life.

The benefits of competing at a young age

One result of playing a lot online is that I realize that it improved me personally. My competitiveness went up, even though I didn’t play a lot of sports I still played a lot of competitive games. Keep in mind, this was a time before the term esports existed in the same way that it does today. Competing against other people online made me a lot more prepared for the real world then I think I would have been if I didn’t play any games. If I didn’t learn the skills that I learned I probably wouldn’t be where I am today.

Learning how to speak English in high school was very valuable, and I still remember taking my final exam in high school and getting a B which in Norway is the second best score. We use a scale of one to six, and five out of six which is the second best score, where the best score is probably reserved for the top to one or two people so it was already difficult to reach. There were always a few other students who were always way better than me no matter how good I thought I was.

The English skill that I learned from gaming turned out to help me get into the study that I wanted to enroll in in upper high school, which again got me into the media and communications field, which again landed me one of the best jobs that I was dreaming about back then! Now I am actually able to work within the field that I want, and I probably wouldn’t have been able to go to that school or those classes if I wasn’t doing well in English.

The impact on my life

Overall I would say that gaming has been positive for my life. With the direction that the world is going in today where technology’s becoming a bigger part of our lives year after year I think that having the skills and interests that I developed as a result of gaming will be useful for the years ahead. Many parents might agree that too much gaming is bad for you, and I agree with this as well, however we need to realize that 2–4 hours per day isn’t that unusual anymore due to the technological society we live in. Even though I probably could have been considered a gaming addict at many points in my life I believe that the positive aspects combined with being an introvert outweighs the negative aspects. That being said, addiction is a serious problem, and I encourage anyone who believes that they might have trouble with gaming to seek help. However I do not believe that gaming in general is negative, and would strongly advise people who believe so to do some research on your own to figure out why. When we read headlines about kids who are spending more time indoors and becoming addicted to gaming I believe that we need to look at the bigger picture, as the media is known to pull stories from the fringes that may not always paint a clear picture of the situation. That being said, shining a light on all aspects of gaming will benefit gamers and parents as a whole, and it will help us make better decisions in the future.

How has gaming impacted your life?