I Read a Lot

I have to make it clear – I like reading and I read a lot. This hobby that I have might not be so popular at this moment in our history and in our society right now. I have read tens of books during the last years. I actually don’t have any statistics to back this up. I only have this pile of books that is showed in the featured image of this blog post. I have read all of them.

I have this habit of putting a book that I have read to a pile. I have many piles like this. I also have a pile of books in my home that I haven’t yet started to read. I read one book at a time. Sometimes I abandon the book I am reading but this is not so usual as I can find many topics interesting to me. These kind of rules help me to grasp on this hobby. At times I feel a bit amazed of how large these piles are.

“Why do I enjoy reading?”, one might ask. I have always been an introvert. This was apparent all the way through my childhood. I liked drawing. I stayed home for hours drawing. When I was seven years old I learned to read. I was nine years old when I started learning English in school. At first I read books written in Finnish. Lately I have picked up some books that were written in English. I have thought about also reading a book written in French or Swedish since I have studied both of them.

I haven’t really counted how many books I have read. I can make some conclusions. During my four week vacation I read four books. That makes one book per week. I don’t normally read at a pace this fast. The time I do spend reading is depending very much on what else I have to do. This includes working, cleaning the house and things like that. Also, my other freetime hobbies take up some time.

Some topics I am interested in when it comes to books are technology, future, science, physics, space, video games (of course), programming, computers, philosophy and phychology. I do read also fictive books (like that book written by Dan Brown that you can find form the image featured on this blog post).

I just wanted to impress this side of my life also. I read a lot. Currently I am reading a book about Linux and its creator Linus Torvalds. The book is titled “Kapinakoodi” that means “Rebel Code”. The book is a bit old but the topic is fascinating.

Playing can be very time consuming. I started wondering how many hours have I actually spent playing. How much of my time, or even my life, I have spent enjoying video games. Would it be months? Or years? Why don’t we do some calculations on this.

How many hours is there in a month? One month has 30 days which have 24 hours each. So there is 720 hours in one month. One year has 365 times 24 hours. That means one year has 8760 hours. We can approach this problem by thinking how many games have you completed so we can calculate an approximation of how many months or even years you, the player, has spent playing.

To complete a modern role playing game would require maybe 100 hours. For a shorter action game it would mean that it takes about 15 hours to complete. These games are much shorter than RPGs. Driving games would take propably about 15 hours also. Games like Fallout 4, Final Fantasy series’s games and other games like this take a bit longer to complete.

I think we shouldn’t try to calculate precisely the amount of hours but we can figure out an estimation. In one full month I would play Final Fantasy VII about seven times through. That’s a whole lot of playing. In one year I could play again Final Fantasy VII thorugh over 85 times. This would be a ridiculous amount of time to spend playing.

So the time I have spent playing, in my lifetime, might be somewhere between maybe months or even one year. But I don’t think many gamers come close to maybe two or three years. So these calculations can give you an idea of how much of your time you have actually spent playing in total. There however are much more boring and not so improving things you can spend your time. Playing games is a big part of my life. But you got to remember that there are more important things in life also…

Intensive Gaming Diary

Tag: hobbies

I Read a Lot

Let’s do some math…