[Dante Hicks]

As I've got older I've got more of a "complex" about wasting time. When I was at school I would have hours and hours of free-time so it didn't really matter if I spent six hours every evening playing Frontier or similar.

But now I'm in my mid-twenties, I do feel vaguely dissatisfied if I spend a lot of time which has been unproductive. Not because of guilt, but simply because I realise there's a finite amount of hours left and doing something which has no sort of reward is pointless.

There's different levels though and "reward" can be defined in a number of ways. I think one of the things about on-line gaming in particular (but perhaps games in general) is that there are rewards for continuing to play (just perhaps slightly pointless ones). If you finish a nine hour session of WoW you do feel (I imagine) like you've achieved something, even if it was levelling up n times, or killing x bad guys.

The same happens with these forums - they're pure time-wasting in one sense but then after posting you do feel like you've done something (in the form of post-counts, reputation counts, people replying to your posts, etc). I think I'd find it a lot easier to quit this forum if post-counts / post-archives were deleted every week or something.

At the other end there's things like Solitaire. I was playing Solitaire the other night on a PDA and I found mysel fthinking "wtf am I doing?". It was a pointless exercise which had no reward (not even internally to the process) and so I stopped immediately.