Time Sinks

Fernando has one particularly vivid memory of being seven years old. It was a Saturday morning and, as with most Saturday mornings in the year 1991, cartoons were of utmost importance to a great portion of the population. Fernando was engaged in a heated argument with his younger brother this morning at around 8.30. His brother wanted to watch A Pup Named Scooby Doo on ABC.

Fernando, though, had done the thing that people simply stop doing, for some mysterious reason, once they reach a certain age: he had gotten up bright and early, incredibly early, something like 5.30 AM early, in order to play the copy of Mega Man 3 that he had leveraged his mother into renting from the local video store for the weekend the day before. For those of you who know the game's geography, Fernando was currently paused on the long ladder in Magnet Man's stage after the disappearing-blocks-over-bottomless-pits-and-oh-here-are-some-magnets-to-make-it-more-hellacious section. Fernando ended up losing that argument and had to turn off the NES. It was heartwrenching.

The above trip down nostalgia lane is one of the examples of Fernando's penchant for video gaming. He was quite an avid gamer in his younger days, especially with regards to role-playing games. About his junior year of college, though, he flagged in his dedication because at that juncture it became necessary to devote more than just a token effort to doing well in his classes (that, and he was finally taking interesting courses pertaining to his fields of study instead of boring required blowoff things like Intermediate College Algebra and Fundamentals of Interpretative Reading).

So Fernando sort of fell behind the electronic gaming curve and, well, he has never really caught up. His most recent console is a PS2 for which he has maybe four or five games total, all RPGs or strategy-RPGs. He has a DS but only owns about four games for that. Most newer PC games are right out because he's too stingy to upgrade his computer's hardware to play them at a functional level, spare time notwithstanding. He follows gaming trends decently, though, as befits his status as Keeper of a Dominion dedicated to home entertainment.

But he doesn't have the time to be what is commonly considered to be a “hardcore” gamer these days. Oh, he sinks his fair share of hours into Dwarf Fortress or League of Legends, but gone are the days of the ten-hour video game marathon. Fernando is a little sad at that. There really is some queer, visceral joy he derives from going a full night without sleep just to play that much further into his new electronic toy. But he simply can't when he has to work the next day, every day. So now he simply squeezes in a bit before or after work or fires up Bejeweled (that one doesn't need a hyperlink) or GemCraft when things are extra slow and he's not otherwise sucked into Wikipedia or TVTropes or Fark or writing or whatever.

This is the personal downside of maintaining his own Dominion. He's weirdly OK with that.