So my brother has opened up a new blog called psone classics. He’s written up a little article on responsible gaming in university. Please check out the post and take a look at the blog.

Video games are a great way to entertain yourself, they’re relatively cheap, engaging, and if you have friends that play as well, they can even be social. But sadly there is a dark side to gaming, and many of us have seen friends slowly disappear to the cave of their dorm rooms with a computer loaded with World of Warcraft, boxes full of energy drinks, with friends and homework forbidden inside.

This is a sad thing, seeing your friends disappear into that world, where nothing else matters but that next item they’ve been working towards, or that boss they need to slay before they can sleep for the night. It’s really tragic to see this take hold on a friend of yours, but even worse when you become that cave dwelling Red Bull guzzling potato.

How can you avoid this gruesome fate?

This list will help.

(I mean, if you don’t stay in school and get a good job, where will your gaming budget go? Down that’s where.)

Part One, Choose the right games.

The Campaign in this game took 5 hours, the online can span hundreds.... - Image via Wikipedia

First off, you need to move away from the “games with no end”. W.O.W. is the big one, but there are others out there, like the multi-player shooters, Team Fortress, Call of Duty, Left for Dead… These games are all a ton of fun, but because they have no end (W.O.W. more so and the others through multiplayer) it’s easy to get addicted, and because there’s no end, nothing is there to make you think twice about gaming all night (and it’s something that happens quite regularly). Playing games with a storyline that has a beginning, middle and end are a much safer bet, once the story is finished there’s a sense of closure. Afterwards sleep seems like an interesting reprieve, and of course, that paper that needs to get done by Friday.

Part Two, use games as your reward.

This is something I do a lot of. When I’m really looking forward to a new release, I’ll pre-order it, and put it on my TV. I also take a post-it note and write a goal on it, then stick it to that pristine box with that sure to be interesting game I’ve been waiting for inside.

This gives you something to work towards, perhaps it’s a reward for finishing your exams, or for completing your last assignment in this way you can make your gaming habit work for you instead of it working against you.

(there is also some research to suggest your gaming habit makes you smarter, check out the link at the bottom of this post)

Part 3, If you’re an online gamer.

If you’re an online gamer and many of you are, there is one trick that will help you not get SO addicted to playing online, that trick is to only play with people that you know in real life.

When someone gets addicted to an online game such as World of Warcraft, they not only get addicted to the gameplay, but to the social aspect as well. A few game companies have realized this and released games such as Mafia Wars, Farmville, etc. on social media sites not only to get them to play those games, but make it so if they quit their habit (of playing an MMORPG or something like Farmville) they’ll lose those people they knew online.

If you were seriously addicted to playing Farmville for instance (a game on Facebook) you’d have to leave the site, because half of all the updates now are “Jenny found a sad little cow on her farm in Farmville, will you help her?” Imagine the power that has, making not only the work you put into the game something you’d lose, but friends as well.

Boiled down, if you play online, have a guild, etc, make it a local guild that does things other than play games together, then you’ll have real friends instead of just nameless people you meet on the internet (not real friends).

Part Four, Use your time wisely.

If you’re studying you need a lot of time to get all your assignments, labs, and papers finished and up to par. But you need time to unwind as well. Gaming works well in this regard as a great source of escapism, but there’s a time for it.

Make a schedule with all the classes, HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:30:56 GMT Server: Apache X-Pingback: http://virtualteachingassistant.com/blog/xmlrpc.php Last-Modified: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:49:53 GMT ETag: "94fa7852bf4e60049562b4bb79c37c2e" Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

OK

Please contact the server administrator, support@supportwebsite.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.