Greg Kasavin is site director of GameSpot. Despite having written a bunch of articles about games, he still clams up trying to explain why he likes them so much. Send mockery to [email protected].

　　If you think you might be a little too hooked on your favorite games, you don't have to quit cold turkey. You don't have to walk away from it all. But you do need to learn how to get it under control. Set a schedule where you have specific nights to be out of the house, away from games, or, if you can't do that, invite a bunch of friends to your house and play a social game. Games like Halo 2 and Mario Party are great for that kind of thing. At the end of the day, look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself this one fundamental question: Are you playing the game, or is it playing you?

　　Excerpts from my high school diary: Freshman year, my first love.

　　It's easy to feel the pressure to scale back on all that game playing, since--let's face it--it's unproductive. Society urges you to be a good worker bee, to study hard while you're still in school and to work hard when you decide you're done going to classes.

　　So when I grudgingly decided I was spending "too much" time playing games (this was sometime in high school), rather than simply scale back and play less--I wasn't about to do that--I decided to turn an unproductive activity into something more industrious.

　　Specifically, I started writing articles about games. I turned my favorite thing into my job. Of course, it isn't quite as rosy as that makes it sound, but it's the bottom line, so I'd recommend my same sequence of decisions to whoever else feels compelled to play games seriously and forever.

　　Sophomore year, the true meaning of friendship.

　　Basically one day I explained to my parents that it wasn't just for fun anymore--now I was in publishing, and the fanzine my friend and I put together was legitimate enough to get us access to the Consumer Electronics Show and the very first Electronic Entertainment Expo. They took that pretty well, sanctioning my newly reinvigorated hobby and happy to see that I was doing more than just vegging out for hours at a time in front of the TV.

　　And, truth be told, I felt better about the whole thing, too. All these years later, I still feel guilty when I find myself playing a game "just for fun," meaning past the point at which I believe the time I'm spending is contributing to my overall knowledge of games, let alone could be reinvested into some sort of an article. It's not that my concept of games has been warped from entertainment into work--I still play games for fun all the time--it's just that I've trained myself to make most of my game-playing time something I feel good about.

　　There's tremendous opportunity to make a living in gaming, whether it's by helping to actually make games, writing about them, or something else. And while this career path is commonly cited as one of those dream jobs you read about sometimes, you should know that working with games for a living absolutely can and will change your perspective about them, for better or worse.

　　When your favorite hobby is also your job, it might cause you to find some other outlet for your rest and relaxation, or if you don't, then you might run into trouble in other areas of life. After all, everyone's day is only 24 hours long--we're all on a level playing field in that respect, so if you spend all your time with games, then you're making some sacrifices.

　　As for me, I traded the time most people my age spent socializing in exchange for an early start on my profession of choice. As a result, I had one of those typically miserable times in high school and then in college (since I was a loner, except not one of those cool ones you see in the movies). But it was made easier knowing I had a job I loved to come back to.

　　In my last semester of college, when I finally met some other graduating English majors, I was shocked to realize how many of these people were deeply concerned about their futures. Their time was up--now they had to face the real world.

　　Junior year, the naginata is mightier than the sword.

　　And I was doubly shocked to realize they were envious of me, not just the other way around--these very same people I had spent four years wishing I could be friends with and hanging out with. All because I already had a job lined up...one that involved writing for a living, no less. Once the shock subsided, I just had to shake my head. I'm far past the point of having any regrets over the actions I chose to take that led me down a very particular road, especially because I've always remained true to my convictions that games are one of the greatest things in the world.

　　But I've come to realize that when people ask me for my advice on how to get their foot in the door, I feel some amount of caution is in order--after all, if you work with games for a living, you'll be up against people ready and willing to spend all their waking hours doing the best work (or simply the most work) humanly possible.

　　Senior year, even the biggest obstacles can be removed. Thanks to KLOV.com for the memories.

　　To me it's perfectly obvious why the game industry has grown so explosively during the past decade or two--whether people are just writing about games or actually helping to make them, I suspect that game-industry professions tend to draw out some of the hardest-working people around.

　　Work hard, play hard is a good motto. Sometimes a reality check is what it takes to make someone question how much time and energy, let alone money, they invest into gaming. Whenever some catastrophe in the world occurs, you can count on all the gaming forums you visit lighting up with message board threads coming from people who question, what's it all for? Shouldn't we be doing something serious with our lives instead of wasting them away in front of our monitors and televisions? No one's ever confronted me directly on that subject, challenging me to justify what it is that I do versus, say, the important work of a neurologist (like my mom) or an engineer (like my dad). But if they did, I know exactly what I'd do: I'd probably get kind of flustered, stammer some meek response, and then think of the Jerk Store. And then go home and keep playing.

　　Next Up: But Is It Art? by Matthew Rorie