Personally, I love video games. I consider myself someone who is very passionate about them. Still, I don't play a minimum of 30 hrs/week -- to me, that seems unrealistic. Not that I've never logged 30 game-hours in a single week, but we're talking about a standard weekly minimum here.
I mean, who does anything besides sleep or work for a minimum 30 hrs/week? I suppose such a scenario is theoretically possible. Assuming a full-time work week, you could still log 30 hours of playtime as long as you spent 8 hrs/day on the weekends, plus around 3 hrs/weeknight. Or 10 hrs/day on weekends and 2 hrs/weeknight.
But doesn't that sound awful? To me, it's depressing. You wouldn't have any life outside of video games. I guess it's an obsessive culture is like that, and plenty of those people are out there. More likely, candidates who qualify for this position only work part-time, or not at all, so 30 hrs/week isn't as much to ask.
I resent it, though. It reminds me of Hollywood, where people habitually confuse passion with obsession. The conclusion that "passion naturally leads to obsession, thus they are one and the same" is a non sequitur fallacy.
There's a parallel here with Martin Luther's (originally, St. Paul's) distinction between faith and works. While faith will likely be reflected in works, works don't prove faith, works can exist without faith, and works are subsidiary to faith. So we are not saved by our works, but by our faith, which is why it was wrong for the Catholic church to profit from the sale of indulgences.
An intense foodie who truly loves food isn't expected to prove it by eating constantly. Nor does an eating obsession doesn't prove that you're passionate about food. Obsession only proves that you're obsessive.
Maybe it's just the nature of competitive fields -- they have the luxury of requiring people to be "experts," and the only way somebody gets to be an expert is 10,000 hours of practice. So the industry self-selects for borderline-psycho, super-intense, obsessive nerd-types with no life and no hope of relating to most of humanity. And then they're expected to create relatable art.
That's fracked up, if you ask me.
--Dan Colgate
