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?

Shit...thats a lot of games >_>

Disgea 1,2 and 3: over 700 hours
Everquest(played since it came out, quit for WoW in 04): Has to be over a year
World Of Warcraft: when I quit last year i think my main had 2 years 100 something days played, I do wonder how much of that was being alt tabbed doing other things though
D2:LoD: I really dont even wanna think about it.
 
edit: to somehow redeem myself for the WoW playtime I would like to add i've managed not to fail any class in college for the last 3 years. lol

The most I ever played was probably close to 200 hours in Final Fantasy XII. 
 
I've probably played much more Super Smash Bros and Mario kart than that over the years, though...

The first thing I thought of when I saw the title was "4 8 15 16 23 42".  But that's just me and my obsessive Lost thinking. 
 
But yeah...  I've played a lot in my time.  Here are some stats and estimates:
 
At least 500 hours of Quake 3 Arena and Quake Live combined.   
334 hours of Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Jedi Academy273 hours of Team Fortress 2
167 hours of Warcraft 3. 
130 hours of Street Fighter IV.
117 hours of Guild Wars.  
100-something hours of Runescape. (Why did I play this? >_<)
82 hours of Knight Online.  
64 hours of Gunz.  
49 hours of Civilization IV.
50 hours of all the Sims games. (Again, Why?)
28 hours of Borderlands. 
 
That adds up to an estimate of 1,894.  That's PC games only, and I'm probably forgetting a ton of games.  Not a massive amount, but still kinda ridiculous.

Definitely WoW.  Nothing even comes close.  In fact, I'm waiting for the servers to come back up from maintenance now.  Besides an MMO, it's probably Persona 3.

Oh man.... I've beaten sooooooooooo many games.  I wish I had a persistent list, like the XBL game collection, that showed me everything I've beaten.  Ballpark estimate: 5000 hours

There's always worse things you could be doing, like sniffing glue or something. As long as you play many games and not live in your parents basement grinding in some MMO, spending thousands of hours gaming is fine.

I was fairly shocked to see I had accumulated close to 2,000 hours on Guild Wars alone over 2 years >.> I honestly don't play that game much at all, I don't know how those hours got there. Seriously, I play like less than 2 hours a week and maybe ~10 hours a week during the summer.

I've often wondered just how much time I've put into video games as well. Still, I figure as long as the games remain compelling and I can still write about 'em, I'll keep playing 'em. Here's to the next 365 days.

I checked my xfire profile--apparently 2310 hours since January 2006.  I would estimate before that I'd spent 3500 hours between Age of Empires II, Warcraft III, Age of Mythology and Age of Empires III alone.  I'm not really sure how many hours I've accumulated on consoles, but I haven't spent any significant time with consoles since I was a kid, with the exception of a medium length stint with Halo 2.  Even though I don't game so much anymore, I don't regret spending this much time.  Even now I'd probably spend 3+ hours a day gaming if there were any decent RTS games released in the past few years.

When I think about how many hours I've spent schooling, cleaning, sleeping and working my absurd number of hours gaming hours is actually kind of a relief. :)

Pffft, in my lifetime (I stopped playing just over a year ago), I spent about 12-15 thousand hours playing some form of Counter-Strike (started in the beta and played through source). 
Now that's unsettling.

I use Xfire to keep track of my hours 'wasted' on games, so far I managed to spend a grand total of 2.450 hours on World of Warcraft.

Granted, it's been since the very start of the European Beta that I've been playing WoW but that's still a hefty amount over a period of 5+ years.

Although Xfire is far from accurate since even running the exe gives hours spent on WoW when I know for a fact I've had nights spent on homework/projects while running WoW on the background to avoid queues.

Complete record for Xfire has 5.292 hours registered on games. Started using Xfire since 2005 so anything released before that isn't even recorded.

The most I've played a game was definitely Oblivion at around 500 hours total. My main save had around 270 hours on it, I had a second save that was around 100 hours and got it on PC and played another 150 or so hours. All other games utterly pale in comparison, though, which is why I find it strange. I normally don't play games for more than 30-40 hours total (averaging, of course) and I don't have time to play many different games over the course of a month or a year. In all, I'd say I get around 4 games a year for 360 and another 4 or 5 on PC but only play around 7 over the year.

I also wish that there was some system that kept track of the total time you spent playing games on a particular system.  I don't want to always check the time when I start playing and when I stop playing something.  Or I wish that more games actually tracked it individually.  Anyways, the game I've spent the most time in is probably Maple Story.  It's strange, even when I started playing it about 4 years ago, I just went into it jokingly and to see what was up.  Ended up playing an estimated amount of about 500 hours.

When I saw that I had played Final Fantasy 11 for (Don't want to say) when I was 14, I knew I needed to stop.

In checking Quake Live right now, it says I have logged 9 days. Not that much considering time I've sunk into other games, but isn't listing days a little counterproductive to the award scheme? Like charging $5 instead of saying $4.99, if you catch my drift.

When I saw this topic title, the first thing that came to mind was: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42
 
Anyways, I would be embarrassed to tell you how many hours I've spent playing WoW. 

I guess sims 2 must have taken most of my time, cause at that time I didn't have many other games, and now that I have a lot of games, I don't have much time..

4,8,15,16,23,42  
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" @teh_destroyer: Person number 3 to reference Lost lol. I guess I should have thought of a different title :P "