Fun with Numbers

In LotRO (and other MMOs I suspect), there is a function where you can find out how much accumulated time you've spent logged in as a specific character (type the command /played into the chat bar). On a lark, I decided to do this on my main character, Melawe. My result: 2 months, 3 days, 18 hours, 56 minutes and 34 seconds.

By itself, that number seems like mere trivia, but I am trained in math, so to speak, so I had an innate need to make that number mean something relevant. Well, here's the relevance: I created that character a mere 10ish months ago, so quickly that number becomes: 20% of my existence since her creation has been poured into her. After a little more tinkering with this /played function, I discovered that my other characters I've created since Melawe have taken up an additional 7% of that time.

That means that if I sleep for approx. 30% of my time, then there's only 70% left of my life to fit all this play time into, which means that I am logged into LotRO for 39% of my waking life, and this isn't even counting any characters I may play that were created before I created my main character (and there are several of those - the reason I can't include them in my analysis here is that they would pollute the data, since I cannot discern how much of their playtime has occurred since Melawe's inception).

If we translate this into hours per day, then I play as Melawe for an average of 4.74 hours per day and another 1.7 hours playing as one of my other 5 characters I created after Melawe, for a grand total of 6.44 hours per day (nearly 7 hours per day).

That's a lot of time. Thinking back, every time I get passionate about something, large percentages of my time go into whatever my fixation is. When it was Diablo II, there was a similar amount of time devoted; when it was watching season after season of Buffy on DvD, there was actually probably a greater percentage of time devoted to it, when it was board games, I played every night and stayed up far later than I do for LotRO (I cannot force myself to get less than an average of 7 hrs sleep per night anymore, but I sure did in those days). All these things are much better than homework, which in my university days took up almost 50% of my time (cutting severely into my sleep time).

The good thing about fixating on one activity for a long period of time is that the cost of entertainment is dramatically reduced. Here are some examples of common entertainment activities:

Watching a movie in a theatre (per person): admission: $12, snacks: $8, gas: ? time: 2 hours.
Watching a rental movie, new release: cost, $5, time: 2 hours.
Cable TV: $40 per month, suppose 80 hours per month

Here are some of my activities and attached habits:
Settlers of Catan: Cost (assuming it wasn't a gift): $50. hours played: 1000+
LotRO: Total cost (assuming it wasn't a gift): $325. hours played: 3614 (this is a tally of most of my chars)
Buffy (assuming I paid for it instead of borrowing them): $350, for 144 hours

Summary:
Theatre: $10/hr (plus gas)
Rental movie: $2.50/hr
Buffy: $2.43/hr
Cable TV: $0.50/hr
Lotro: $0.09/hr
Settlers: $0.05/hr

Some of these activities have recurring fees, which keep their cost/hour up, whereas others have a one time fee, and these get cheaper and cheaper the more you engage in them. My current affliction has me entertained for 9 cents per hour, and that will go down and down and down as I continue to play.