This Friday, Bethesda Softworks will release Skyrim, the fifth installment of The Elder Scrolls series of role-playing video games, and my GPA will subsequently plummet to unprecedented lows. Or at least that’s what I hope.
In the summer of 2006, when The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion came out, I logged about 150 hours playing the game. When I say that I have been counting the days to Skyrim’s release, I am not lying. But there is an obstacle that may keep me from recording monumental hours on my Skyrim account. Since graduating from high school, I have become too lazy to play video games.
I keep up with this laziest of lazy activities. I read video game blogs, constantly recount video games from my childhood with my friends, and even still buy games. Yet I do not possess the willpower to sit down and play new releases. In fact, I played the last video game I bought, Fallout 3, for all of about five hours, half of which were spent creating my character.
I worry that I may have outgrown video games. The last time I played a game all the way through was two years ago, and that took about 15 hours. As a child, I would have spent much more time wreaking havoc in the sandbox of the game’s world before addressing the actual plot. But as an adult, I plowed through the game without diverging on killing sprees or mindless exploration.
This is ostensibly a sign of my maturity. But it’s not that I feel guilty going out of my way to blow people’s heads off. It’s just that the virtual deviance that was once a dirty pleasure has lost that key word—pleasure.
While I am still fascinated by games that are being released—I’ve probably watched the Grand Theft Auto V trailer four times since its release last Thursday—I can’t play a game without thinking I could be doing something else more productive. Yes, I have probably spent countless hours deciding whether I want to play a game, but I always come to the conclusion that my time would be best spent doing something else, like watching dubstep videos on YouTube.
This internal dilemma stems from my perception of video games as massive time consumers. Just as I wouldn’t choose to read a massive novel without reading a few reviews, I won’t play a video game without first doing my research. But once the research is finished and I have the game in front of me, the sheer intimidation of the time investment ahead of me strips away all of my will to play it. It’s a painful process, and its full toll on my mental health will only be discovered when I admit to a therapist that I habitually procrastinate on my video game-playing.
And then there is the standard excuse many college students give for their decline in video game usage: I don’t have time to play. While I may be torn by a sense of guilt while playing video games, I know deep down in my gut that I have the time to do it. The time that could be spent on video games is never transferred to study time—it’s spent looking up obscurities on the Internet. To say that I don’t have time to play would mean overlooking the countless hours I spend watching Futurama re-runs and trolling IMDB forums.
So as the release of Skyrim approaches, I can assure you that I will buy a copy the day of its release. But that’s about the only thing I can promise at this point—whether I actually play the game or not is up in the air. If I could just summon the strength to sit down for six hours at a time and explore this dragon-inhabited fantasy world, I would be able to revive my glory days of lethargic video game-playing. My grades would be a small price to pay for a shot at redemption in its most pathetic form.
