Giving Up Gaming 1: It begins

Hello! My name is Chris Lock and you’re joining me for a personal experiment. I am going to give up games (mostly) for an entire year, just to see what happens. But first a little background as to why I am doing this.

A few years ago I started writing for LevelSave, just for fun. The site grew and shrank, as sites do, but kept chugging along all the same. Because of my work I was able to do some stuff I hadn’t thought possible. Namely to interview developers, get review copies of games, and even attend PAX Prime as media. You may think I’m bragging and you would be right. To me these were pretty great accomplishments and I was so glad to have done them. But then… *lower light level, queue somber tones* I had a child.

I jest, my son has been around since before I started on with LevelSave, even by just a few weeks. But having a child made my funds, already tight, squeak in agony. This meant I had to look at my game vault in a different way. Over the years it culminated in the post “No Game is Worth $60” an opinion piece I still stand by. Though I understand the reaction it received because I was basically calling out “gamers” for being stuffed zealots. But I digress.

The internet in this time was becoming more and more hateful by the second. I had found good people and good friends but their voices seemed drowned out by the mass vitriol that was sweeping by. Gamergate was the breaking point for me and when I decided to get out of games journalism completely. From then on, if I wrote anything, I would write for me. Hence this post and experiment.

The last thing that pushed me down this road was the timer on Pokemon X. Those of you who know me know that Pokemon is my favorite series and the games I play the most. A few weeks ago I saved the game and saw that the time played was just under 400 hours. This sent my mind back in time to tickle a thought I have had since I was a child. What if I had used all the hours I spent on games, as a whole, doing something else? Doing something productive rather than recreational?

So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to cut down my gaming and see what I can accomplish with all that extra time.

Here are the rules:

I can play a game only once a week. (Usually on a day off.)
I will have unlimited time constraints on that day. (Because I know I will not be able to limit myself to any number of hours.)
Otherwise I can play no games, not even Candy Crush.
I will not replace the usual game time with TV time.

Now, getting to play a game once a week may seem like a cop out but since I can casually spend 6 hours playing, on a work day, (I’m a monster) I feel it is a balanced trade.

During this time I have a few things that I would like to try and these are the things I’ll be talking about in subsequent posts.

Make a game.
Get better at trading stocks.
Spend more time with my family, doing family like activities.
Read, like, a ton more.
Try my hand at Karate.
Write, like, a ton more.
Learn Spanish.

If you haven’t picked up on it already this entire experiment is about bettering my life. Maybe, if I get through this with my sanity, I can inspire someone else to cut down their gaming and better their own life. Self-indulgent daydreams aside, I do want to hear from you. I’ll be posting an update every two weeks to let you know what I’ve done, what I did play with my one day, and what is working or not working. See you then!

You can leave a comment on any post, hit me up on twitter, or shoot me an email to [email protected].

Giving up Gaming is a biweekly editorial piece following the real-life accounts of LevelSave’s own Chris Lock as he attempts to cut video games from most of his every day life.