On the World Cup and its negative effects on Gaming

Normally I’d play two hours per day

I only started playing Civ V the 9th of April 2013. That was 467 days ago. Since then I played 958 hours (this game only). That’s pretty accurately 2 hours per day. Call me a clockwork!

Also I checked how many games of Civilization V I have played since the start. How can you check this? Go to Users\You\Documents\My Games\Sid Meier’s Civilization 5\Replays and see how many replay files there are. For every finished game one replay file is being created. For me it’s 108, so a game of Civilization 5 takes about 9 hours.

At the moment I have 224 Civilization 5 Steam Achievements. So it takes about 4,5h to make one Steam achievement. Again, that’s the average so far.

The stagnation

My last post on this blog (the Rise of the Mongols Strategy Guide) was published 2014-06-12. Since then I haven’t got much done. Neither did I write blog posts, nor did I spend a lot of time playing video games. I mean – look at THIS:

Civilization 5 last played two weeks ago

Two solid weeks without Civilization! Now why is that?

The Civilization V blog is taking off! Yaaay!

First of all I’ve been resting on my laurels. For two months now the blog is doing incredibly well with average session duration, visits and page views per visit constantly increasing:

Civilization 5 blog kalle-online.net weekly stats

I’m extremely happy with this, which is why I got lazy writing more content.

Less Gaming – more Football!

(And yes, I’m European: This side of the pond it’s called football, not soccer! 🙂 )

FIFA World Cup 2014 Black Red and GoldThe World Cup was the biggest “distraction” from gaming for me. Of the 64 matches I have watched 28.

13 of 48 matches in the group stage: I haven’t seen a single match of groups C (Colombia, Ivory Coast, Greece, Japan), E (Switzerland, Ecuador, France, Honduras) and H (Belgium, Algeria, Russia, South Korea). Not because I didn’t expect those games to be good games of football – mainly because of a mixture of bad timing and less renowned teams. For example I stayed up until way past midnight for England vs. Italy. I didn’t do that for Russia vs. South Korea.

15 of 16 matches in the knockout stage, with the only match I missed being Brazil vs. Colombia (mainly because I was celebrating the victory over France in Germany’s quarter final).

The 13 group stage matches, say 120 minutes each (90 minutes and 15 minutes half time plus added time and some highlights after the match), add up to 26 hours of football!

In the knockout stage only 8 of 16 matches had been decided in regular time. That’s another 16 hours. Then there’s been 4 matches which had been won or lost after extra time, say 160 minutes each (120 minutes explained above, plus 30 more minutes of football with a 5 minute break and 5 minutes added time). In sum that’s 10 hours, 40 minutes! Four games had been decided via penalty shootout. Even if that would take only 10 minutes more than a match with extra time, that would be another 11 hours, 20 minutes.

Overall those 28 football matches I watched took about 64 hours!!!

The bottom line

So 64 hours of football in 30 days. In this time I could have finished 3 games of Civilization V and made 15 Steam Achievements.

64 hours of football in 30 days. Is that too much? Can there be too much? Nope!

64 hours of football in 30 days. Was it worth it? Absolutely!

Do I say that as a German? Yes.

4 thoughts on “On the World Cup and its negative effects on Gaming”

  1. Congratulations to Germany for winning the world cup.

    I just found your blog. I read a lot on your civ 5 walkthrough and I like it so much. Thanks a lot.

    1. Thank you so much! For both the congratz and the compliment 🙂

  2. I don’t think that’s a negative effect. More a temporary shift of priorities of what to do in your free time. 🙂
    Also your average values were just the pure math avg. I remember you when you did finished that impossible game after what, 400+ hrs? 🙂

    1. That was the Deity Achievement in the Fall of Rome scenario (to be linked here, as soon as the article is written). Took about a month, I’d say (so 60 hours, 1 game, 1 Steam Achievement). Shifting priorities in that case in favor of a World Cup win would have been worth it even more. 😀

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