How To Secretly Play Video Games At Night

All-night gaming binges: why practice we do information technology, and what does it exercise to u.s.?

I think it started with G Theft Automobile 3. I moved to London to study in the fall of 2002, and was generously gifted a new PC. At that indicate in my life, games had fallen by the wayside for a few years, but with the newfound liberty moving away from habitation brought, and then too came carefree use of that freedom. With no ane around to suggest I do something more than productive, I cruised the streets of Liberty City, to a radio station of ripped CDs, for hours on end, hooked on the sprawling open world, stunned at how far environments had progressed since I'd last put down an N64 controller. Slowly, I began playing after and later into the nighttime, and then through into the dawn. I worked a job in the evenings and on weekends, but my lectures frequently didn't require waking early, and and so the hours I kept began to change. And I loved it, every minute of it.

Over a decade later, I prefer to play games at night, long after a sensible bedtime. I'm a binge gamer, and one time I get started I don't want to end. It's not that I'1000 playing 24/7 - whole weeks can go past when my consoles remain untouched - but I've always found it difficult to integrate gaming sessions around other activities and responsibilities, favouring a large blowout over snatching an hour of play here and at that place. Particularly with RPG and solo adventure games, which I tend to favour, kicking things off with a binge will actually allow me to become my teeth into a story, to learn mechanics and help me estimate how long I need set aside to make tangible progress in future sessions. A decent chunk of play, say a few hours straight, allows me to get properly captivated, to lose awareness of the awareness of a controller in my manus, to direct all of my focus at the underlying game instead of the hardware carrying it.

While discussion oft throws upwardly resolution and frame charge per unit as keys to a good action game experience, I feel the outcome of the player's environment and circumstances has an understated begetting. Many of my most memorable experiences have been explicitly influenced by the immediate environs: creeping through the electric lit perma-night of BioShock's Rapture at 4am when I was just weeks into a new nightshift job, still adjusting to a weird work design, disorientated by scarcely seeing the dominicus. Later, living in a crap, mouldy flat with a specially breakdown-prone boiler when I began Fallout 3 as wintertime ready in, shivering under blankets, feeling like the callous, irradiated earth was leaking from the screen.

More recently, I picked upwards a copy of The Evil Within only days after moving firm. I still hadn't unpacked or accustomed myself to a new habitat, and this proved to be the perfect accompaniment for such an unnerving game - awaking in an unfamiliar psychiatric infirmary on screen as I settled into in a stark, unfamiliar flat, with its postal service-midnight creaks and groans. My fondest memory, though, comes from my beginning time playing Half-Life two, indelible the ordeal of Ravenholm into the early hours, finally climbing that mine shaft into virtual daylight every bit dawn bankrupt outside my open window, birds singing, the synchronicity magnifying relief.

Playing late at dark ways you'll be more inclined to wear headphones to avert agonizing others, meaning you're more than enclosed, 'closer' to the game. It means you tin can probably dismiss screen glare worries. It ways there are far less distractions, less likelihood a buzzing phone is going to clamour for attention. If you share a goggle box or take young kids, it might be your only choice.

There'south as well something ever so slightly subversive nigh overnight binge gaming; it feels a picayune risky, like you lot're stealing excitement during the slots society - and heck, your own internal clock - deems y'all should exist comatose, a pocket-size infraction confronting the established order of things, in the comfort of your ain home. My Bloody Valentine guitarist Kevin Shields, an exponent of sleep deprivation as a ways to achieve altered states, has suggested that fighting to stay awake "brings the subconscious into the present world," and I feel he'southward onto something. Pushing through tiredness to go along playing puts me on edge, giving tense games a heightened intensity. I feel more involved, more in the game. In the dead of night, with goose egg to distract from the glowing screen, a barrier which separates histrion and game is shed.

I stress, playing like this is a personal choice: I'm not advocating this every bit a lifestyle. When I settle down on the sofa to binge, my preferred living room ambient reads like a checklist of all the things the health and safety box-out in every manual tells you not to do. I play with the lights off. I sit down fashion too close to the screen. I don't take a ten-minute break every 60 minutes*. This is my occasional concession to hedonism. I don't have drugs, I quit drinking last year, and I try my best to swallow well and keep fit. I'm well aware sleep deprivation potentially carries multiple health risks, however - metabolic issues, hormonal fluctuations, a compromised allowed arrangement, cognitive impairment, stress and bouts of poor mental health have all been linked.

With this in heed, if I'm going to sit down up until dawn playing games, I eat a decent supper, stay hydrated, and stay off the caffeine. Junk food and energy drinks are securely, commercially interwoven into games culture - Dew and Doritos, replete with codes for sectional in-game content, are now so embedded as to be tired memes, autograph for the crasser aspects of the manufacture. Pizza Hut and Domino's offer console-app ordering in sure territories, assuasive for minimally interrupted gaming sessions, while snack brands explicitly targeting gamers accept emerged, neat to highlight the energy content crammed into their products, accompanying blurbs focused equally much on battling sleep equally battling rivals. Fifty-fifty the term 'Game Fuel' conjures up not food, but sheer sustenance - the dayglo drinks evoking both RPG ability-upwards potions and the literally death-defying drug administered by Herbert Westward in Re-Animator.

While no make is realistically going to come out and say, "Hey, why not stay glued to the screen for hours on end while staying jittery on our products," or "For true gamers, taking a break to eat properly is never an option," many of these products throw upwardly contradictory messages, promising energy and vitality while enabling sedentary convenience. While not expressly condoning binge gaming, some brands have normalised and capitalised upon overindulgence.

Regularly consumed, a small-hours cocktail of caffeinated drinks - and even caffeinated cashews - accompanied by a rollercoaster of sugar hits and crashes sounds like bad news for both physical and mental wellbeing. Though an farthermost case, last year a 14-year-old was hospitalised with kidney failure attributed to overdosing on energy drinks to fuel his gaming binges. While I've never pushed myself to such dangerous places, I practise worry what people - especially those who don't play games - might make of my habits, although more than farthermost consumption of media seems to be fast becoming the norm.

Any guilt borne of playing games for hours on end has lessened equally rampage-streaming Telly explodes in popularity, with friends and colleagues happily boasting of watching entire seasons over the course of a weekend. The part of entertainment scheduling is diminishing every bit viewers lap up back-to-dorsum episodes made available simultaneously, with providers such equally Netflix happily catering for demand. Thanks in office to social media, there'due south more force per unit area than ever to ravenously eat fresh media, lest one feel left behind in word or, woe betide, stumble upon a spoiler.

Midnight launches, blatant advocates of binge culture, coupled with sharing and streaming tools on new consoles mean that by the fourth dimension you awake on release mean solar day, in that location's a possibility everything that can exist known about a game may already be bachelor in the form of user-generated video. Any sense of mystery is eroded as new single-histrion games get a breakneck treasure chase, a race to see something no other player has yet seen, the resultant contest incentivising long play sessions.

As handhelds stream the horsepower of home consoles via WiFi and the likes of PlayStation Television receiver suggest that gamers "Never cease playing", binging looks set to become more prevalent. Netflix has said equally such, with a 2013 study commissioned past the company finding 73% of Boob tube streamers view the miracle positively. As ease of media accessibility anytime, anywhere catches up with changing habits, greater responsibleness is effectively handed to the consumer over how to regulate their intake. Similar me all those years ago, playing GTA iii all night, every dark to the detriment of my grades, such unbridled freedom carries risks, and the games industry should (but won't) reevaluate its roster of partner brands in a bid to encourage healthier attitudes and accompaniments to inevitable binging.

I'one thousand comfortable in myself and my mental attitude to occasional gaming excesses, but just thanks to trial and error, realising when other aspects of my life suffer every bit a result. Plus, I'm a grown man - born 20 years later, I suspect my addictive inclinations and obsessive tendencies could have hands fallen foul of modern gaming's on-demand immoderacy.

*I learned the difficult way (developing RSI from marathon Dead Rising sessions in 2007) that taking a ten-minute break every hr is very advisable.

Dan is a freelance writer who has written for numerous publications over the years, including AskMen, GamesRadar, and Goodreads.