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Friday, August 21, 2009

A Question of Frivolity

My younger brother gets Game Informer, the video game magazine, and I tend to flip through it whenever I am looking for something to hold my interest for a quick second. So I was flipping through the April 2009 issue and there was an opinion article called: Wasting the Day to Play: Does Gaming Need a Defense? The article starts with the question: “Aren’t games just a waste of time?” (Smith 24)A well meaning question with a bucket load of bias attached to it.

How can you spend your life essentially doing something frivolous? As a writer, one gets similar questions all the time and like David Smith, I find myself fumbling for an answer. I love to write. I do not feel bad for getting up at five in the morning and turning on my laptop before I am even out of bed good.

“Are games a waste of time?” Smith asks in his closing and I have to ask myself a very similar question when it comes to my writing. Is it a waste of time? Am I simply spending my time working toward something with a snowball’s chance in hell of happening?

There is no clear answer to this question. I think I am doing what needs to be done in order to make it. However, this feeling is not necessarily shared. I have to thank David Smith for his articulation of an old question and his answer to it.

Smith, David. “Wasting the Day to Play: Does Gaming Need a Defense?” Game Informer. 192 (2009): 24.

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