The Tip.It Times


Issue 199gp

The absence (or surplus?) of Time.

Written by and edited by Tip.It

Time is sort of a strange thing. It never comes in the right amount.

How come we are never satisfied with how much time we have during the day? We are woken up by an alarm and wish it wasn't the time that it really is, then we hit snooze and wish five minutes would last longer than five minutes actually lasts. We get out of bed and rush to get dressed and eat breakfast in time, now suddenly wishing that we "had more time". School starts and suddenly time is something we want to get rid off. People do all sorts of silly things to kill time during classes and all the students wish it was time for lunch. Lunch, as you all know, needs more time of the day, as does recess if you are lucky enough to go to a school that gives time for that sort of thing. Lunch ends and now it's time to kill time until its time for you to go home. You can't wait to get home and when you do you are happy because now you have a lot of time until it's time for bed. Now this rhyme is all dandy and fine until you decide you want use that allocated time to sit down and just play games.

Don't get me wrong, I love gaming as much as the rest of you. I just find something odd about the whole thing. For hundreds of years games were designed as something to pass the time. Taking a long sea voyage in the 1800s? Play cards with your ship mates. Was it a rainy day in 1950? Have the kids play board games. Does Junior hate those hour long car rides in 1990? Give him a Gameboy. Attending a boring conference at work these days? Play "snake" on your phone, etc, etc.

But somewhere, at some point, that all changed. Games were no longer things used to kill time, but things that many of us plan to do during any extra time we have during the day. I don't know how many of you are old enough to remember the days when the NES and Gameboy were first around. A few people played them intensely but most people played NES when they were bored in the evening or if it was too cold outside. No one really sat around on a sunny days and played Gameboy on a couch, Gameboys were marketed for car rides and airplanes. The gradual change into how we view games today took place over two decades and was essentially unnoticeable.

It's hard to say what I'm trying to get at with this whole concept of the evolution of gaming and the strange nature of time, so I'm just going to try and say it bluntly. Physically we live in the present, but our minds seem more interested in the future. We are always ignoring time, trying to kill it, and are always "looking forward" to some event that will happen soon. We play games for the enjoyment of them but also because they pass the time. This can lead to a problem, many of us never get around to "stop and smell the roses" as they say. People will spend entire summers playing an MMORPG so they can get to a certain level, but in ten years will that matter at all?

It's even more bizarre when you think of the elderly, their minds don't live in the present but rather in the past. That would seem to mean that time is an element that we start out always seem to be trying to get rid of, but when we reach a certain age we realize that time is limited and we try to prolong and relive it. What is the point of killing time now if your going to be trying to savor it later? Some people call me an optimist, but I just say I'm too lazy to spend half my life killing something only to spend the other half of my life trying to save it. I say enjoy things as they happen and don't spend your life sitting around and just constantly looking forward to things that haven't even happened yet.

Thank you for your time.

Did You Know...
... ...that you can slice a bannana with a battleaxe!

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Will you use Menaphos to train your skills?



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