There’s been a lot of action in the gaming world recently. Translation: quite a few new ways to extract dollars from gamers, with new versions of the PSP, the new PSP-Go, the new slim-line PS3 uh… Slim. And of course the almost habitual improvements its competitor, the Xbox.

Gaming is a world that constantly calls me. The call is seductive, like a siren from the deep. Gaming wants me, and it wants all of me. And like most women, it’s not selective; any old (or young) geek can play with her.

So far, I’ve resisted her attractive marine sigh, and  I plan to continue to resist her charms. My reason is simple, pragmatic, and admittedly does tend to come across like the words of an old curmudgeon. But what the heck.

The thing is, I just don’t have the time.

It’s a time-poor world, with technology enabling more work to get done in a day than ever before, but still somehow extending the time it takes to get it all completed. It’s time-poor because the information available to us at every step through the internet is literally without end.

When I’m researching a project, the temptation is to do the old-fashioned thing, and be thorough, exploring whatever information I can gather. That’s a mistake, because the information is almost endless, and the hapless editor can end up spending literally days going through the available material. As well, there’s the constant “THIS LOOKS INTERESTING” diversionary tactic the internet is so good at. It’s taken awhile, but I’ve become pretty good at bookmarking those sites for later perusal. And then, of course, forgetting about them until I go to clean out my online detritus, only to discover a year or two after the fact that most of those interesting sites no longer exist.

But we’re getting off the track here. [And getting off the track is the biggest potential problem in 2009]. The fact is, I just don’t have time for gaming. How DOES anybody have time for gaming, anyway? It’s hard enough to find the time to watch the DVDs/Blu-ray discs I want to see, and each of these represents a couple of hours of my time. A game, on the other hand, can presumably take weeks to master… and if you don’t, then it must feel like a waste of cash.

Then again, perhaps I’m just slow [chorus of "YES, GARY!"] but at the end of the working day, the last thing I want to do is subject myself to the kind of relentless stress that the gaming experience demands from its suckers (I mean, audience). It’s true that back in the Jurassic period, I did have a brief flirtation with arcade games (home gaming didn’t exist back then) and at one point I was the top-scorer in a pathetic but enticing game called (if I remember right) Spiders. I became so obsessed with this game – and my “shooting” hand so painful with the constant pumping repetition – that I eventually joined Gamers Anonymous and retreated back into gaming chastity.

And I’ve never looked back. Now, instead of spending hours, days, weeks learning how to kill well, I occasionally read a book. Sometimes, I even learn something.