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How my mother and a kitchen timer carved out my gaming habits

30 minutes a day. That was the forbidden limit, the sacred rule, an assurance as absolute as the Second Law of Thermodynamics that if I had the audacity to play video games even 15 seconds beyond the dreaded ring of that eggshell kitchen timer that my existence would quickly be filled with punishment and regret. Never mind that as early as age 12, video games were quickly becoming my main mental escape from an abusive, isolated childhood and never mind the unfortunate reality that quite a few video games do not have the ability to be played in easily divisible 30 minute chunks.

I’m not going to talk about honoring my mother this Mother’s Day, because frankly I don’t feel like I have all that much to honor her for. But I will talk about one of the many ways she shaped my life into adulthood.

30 minutes means that any game without the ability to save anywhere and everywhere I wanted was frankly, right out. 30 minutes means that I had to grind excessively before boss fights in RPGs, because being caught by the timer in the middle of a particularly long one was guaranteed to be lost. 30 minutes means that there was a real incentive to use cheat codes and plow through games as quickly as possible because, you know, who wants to spend 30 minutes a day grinding in an RPG or setting up infrastructure in Sim City when there’s a shortcut to the content that makes those games interesting?

Even today, when gaming there’s this mentality I’m set with that simply having fun when playing a game is not enough. I have to feel like there’s an investment, that my time was well spent, that the “me” that came out the experience was greater than the “me” that came in. There’s always that sense of diminishing time in burned into the back of my head when playing video games and, well, I think I have my mother to thank for that.