Things I Do When I Play Videogames: Sometimes I Go to Sleep

I am a very tired person. I couldn't tell you why. I get a decent amount of exercise and I try to go to bed at a decent time. And yet I'm tired. So damn often.

I tend to find myself catching up on my sleep while doing things I like, which is aggravating. It started mostly with watching anime. A lot of that probably owes to the fact that I watch really slow paced anime. As much as I absolutely adore my Legend of the Galactic Heroes and my Galaxy Express 999s, I can barely stay awake when watching them on my worst days.

And of course, it all transfers over to video games, which confuses the hell out of me. Lately I've been getting in the awful habit of laying down on the floor with a pillow in my appointed gaming room. Being that, like above, I've been playing alot of slower paced games (such as Dragon Quest 8), I find it extremely easy just to drop the controller and go to sleep. My biggest mistake is trying to do all that when it's 10:00 PM on a weekend. Instead of loading up on caffeine and sitting in a chair like a "sane" gamer would, I just lay on the floor and try to grind out that next level. This works for about 10 minutes. And then I end up sleeping on the floor with the game going until I wake up with a serious back ache the next morning. What a great plan.

And sometimes it really messes me up. I was about 3/4 the way through Metal Gear Solid 2 one night when I decided to roll over and take a nap. Have you, reader, ever had one of those bizarre dreams wherein you're sitting in your bed and you can't get to sleep? I had something like that. Except instead of that, I was having some crazy nightmare where I was playing MGS2 with a apocalyptic red screen and no cover. And then I woke up and had no clue I was dreaming.

The moral of the story, if there is one, is don't go to sleep playing a game that logs your time. Jeff Green of GFW fame talked on his podcast about falling asleep while playing Portal, bringing his play time to something like 16 hours. My most recent experience left me 11 hours into a game I had really only been playing for about an hour and a half. Oh, America.