After a fairly lengthy gaming session talking with a good friend of mine on private chat over XBL, we got to talking about just how much time we've put into games over the years.

We started with Starcraft which was hands down the longest played game we've ever had. After some quick calculations we figured we spent a total of 2,320 hours. That was a scary figure alone so we decided to chalk up all the games we could think of that were lengthy off the top of our head (Morrowind, Oblivion, the Final Fantasy series, etc) and the number rose to 5,810 hours.

Finally we counted up all the games we have beaten (we have played almost all games together or at the same time so our library of beaten games are almost identical). The list is huge (somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 games). We estimated that another couple of thousands hours should be tacked on.

All told the estimated time spent playing games was 365 days. Yes, one whole freaking year worth of gaming. This would be over a 13 year period as I only really started playing games with the want to beat them at the age of 8.

This made me think about what else I could have done with a year of my life. Then I quickly realized that I didn't care because games are awesome and are 100% a part of who I am. As scary as that number is to me on some level, I'm also kind of proud to say I've done it and still managed to live a normal, social, academically successful life. I think that's proof enough to dismiss those nasty gamer stereotypes.

What game has taken up the most time for you? If you had to guess, how many hours of gaming have you done in your lifetime?