Last night I had Sausages and Mash for dinner. Well, Sausages at 6 O’Clock and Mash at Midnight; does that count as Sausages and Mash for dinner?
Then I went dreamy-bye-bye, and thought about ambling barefoot over the paving stones of didsbury, aimlessly walking to work. Then I dreamt of games, and got so annoyed at myself for my addiction I tried to think of ways of forcing myself to stop. At university I used to give my power cables away every time I wanted to work; now I think a little dynamo powering off your body’s movement would do the job. Every time the circuitry detects that the average input rate (over the course of a day) drops below a certain rate, the battery would start discharging, niggling at first but increasingly painful. Which would certainly make you jump up and do some exercise. If you were playing games for too long, sitting still, that would bring the average input rate down, shocking you into motion. Exercise would buy you lots of time playing games, so we could hope for a pavlovian reaction in the long run, where the gamer starts associating exercise with pleasure and games with pain. Yay!
If you’re feeling guilty about gaming when you should be doing exercise, I recommend combining the two. Sit ups during Oblivion loading screens (MAN you’d have a rock hard stomach in about a week) and press ups and that sort of thing. There’s plenty of downtime in most games these days. Console games are good cos you can sit in a stretch position in front of you tv while you play.
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My advice: find something that’s mutually exclusive to gaming that you want to do more. That’s how I gave up smoking…I couldn’t sing properly when I was smoking….in the end, it was music that made me give up!
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Apparently there’s a plan to do something the opposite with kids. Some scientists have developed a kit that monitors how much running around kids do and at a certain point they earn enough credits to watch telly. I think Chiarina means you should starts smoking instead of playing computer games…
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What ever happened to that very dusty exercise bike of yours?
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Setting one thief to catch another, one addiction to displace another, sounds like a terrible idea, leaving you with two addictions. I’m all for it! Sounds better than sit-ups anyway.And yes, as Neil points out, I used to sit in front of the telly in Bath playing Top Spin whilst on my exercise bike. Unfortunately, the bike is doubtless in some dusty corner of some rural skip by now…
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