I get home from work around 7-8, pretty reasonable time actually, but between wife time, dinner time, laundry time and washing up time, I hardly ever have enough time to game any more.
I’ll be thinking like, yeah Minecraft, sounds rad but… I wouldn’t have the time to do anything. Loved CoH but… yeah, not possible.
I barely have the time to get in an hour of street fighter occasionally.
Do work and gaming ever mix?
Weekends, although even that is disappearing.
For me the culprit right now is my commute. In order to work 9-5 I leave the house at 7:15 and I’m back home at 6:45. Add in a requirement for 8 hours of sleep, time to cook, eat, shower and dress and I’ve got about 2 hours a day to do laundry, housework, play with the dogs, talk to my husband (or vice versa) and any leisure activities including gaming. Right now if it can’t be played on the iPad (and thus played during said commute) it waits til the weekend.
I’m up past my bedtime tonight due to an implementation and I’ve recently been informed that I’ll be working every other Sunday from now til Dec from 4pm to 1am, so a huge chunk of my weekends is disappearing too.
If I’m up at 7, at work at 8, and homearound 5, I’ll do dinner and family stuff until 10-ish, when LaserKitty goes to bed, then I’ll hit Fallout, CoD, Portal, or Borderlands until midnight or 1, depending.
I don’t watch TV. I’m not saying this as a way of implying that I’m superior (even though, you know, I AM), it’s just that most TV just isn’t that interesting to me. I have to make a conscious effort to remember that a certain show is on at a certain time. I think that I’ve watched about 3 hours of TV in the past three months…and that includes a movie that I watched.
I only work ~20 hours a week with a 3 minute commute and I live alone. As a lifestyle it’s not quite perfect, but it does leave me plenty of time to play. I’m also in a long-running tabletop RPG group with a bunch of people of my age (slightly over 30) and people with wives and kids have dropped out one by one over the years. We still have one married guy but his wife is a gamer as well and they have no kids, just two cats.
And yeah, me and my gamer friends mostly don’t care much for TV either. I don’t think I’ve turned mine on for a few months now even though it’s right there.
I get home around 5pm/5.30pm. I don’t have kids. I don’t watch much tv.
Moved Cafe Society --> the Game Room.
I find I have more time for gaming, and general online use during the wintertime. I also limit my gaming to those free Flash games you can find online. I haven’t paid for a game in years, so I’m not exactly like you, but that’s another couplea ways you can make time for gaming when you have other obligations. Many people I know have their gaming system in the bedroom connected to a bedroom TV, instead of late night watching Johnny (yes, I know, it’d be Jay now) they’re doing a few minutes of fragging before they drop off to sleep.
I don’t watch much TV anymore, so that frees up quite a bit of time when I’m at home. I also travel pretty extensively, and when I’m on the road I actually have more play time than when I’m home. I don’t have the time or interest anymore in MMORPGs, so most of the games I play are standalone. That means I can play for a couple of hours, save off, then pick up again later on. That seems to work out well for me and where I’m at right now with RL pressures and concerns. Frankly, now that I’m getting long in the tooth it’s hard for me to sit at a computer for more than a few hours at a time anymore in any case. 
-XT
Most weekdays I have time to put in at least an hour or two of time. But it helps that I do not go to bed until midnight, most days. I get home just after 5, and thus have seven hours of leisure time to eat dinner, do dishes. He cooks, so that helps. I also don’t have children and also don’t watch TV. That doesn’t mean I don’t watch, it’s just that I watch only on DVD or on Netflix, so everything is to my schedule.
Laundry time? Every day? I do laundry once a week. But as I said, there’s only two of us, and we both work white collar jobs, so we don’t really get our clothes that dirty.
ETA: I also don’t play MMPORGs. Don’t like most of them. I prefer stand alone games, and I feel with the gaming population getting older every year, companies should always make sure there are save points. We have lives, you know.
What she said. My husband likes gaming, as well. We each have our laptops in the living room so we can hang out together, or play a game together. If neither of us is playing on the TV using the PS3 or Wii, we’ll have some TV show on in the background.
My kids go to bed at 8 and three night a week, my wife assists her disabled sister go to bed which takes about an hour and a half. So I can play during that time without feeling like I’m neglecting anyone.
We have one thing that actually works out marvelously: I am primarily a console game player, and he is a PC player. So we rarely have to take turns playing as we are usually into different games at the time.
Dunno, it’s just what I do most evenings. I get home around 6:00pm, and dinner is generally out of the way in some capacity by 7:00 or 7:30. Certainly no later than 8. There might be some chores that need doing, but rarely more than an hour’s worth. So by 9, we (That would be, my wife and I) settle in for gaming. Generally in two adjoining rooms, though sometimes we play together as well.
My question to the original poster is… what are you doing with your time? You get home at 8:00, spend two hours on food and an hour on chores and it’s still only 11pm. What time do you have to go to bed? It sounds to me like the answer to your question is “we have shorter commutes that you” because in my opinion, if I were getting home from work at 8:00pm, I’d be looking for a new job, unless I was just stumbling into work around 11:00 or something… in which case I’d be able to stay up well past midnight.
I only have a 15-20 minute commute and have no social life or family to take care of. I have plenty of time to game.
In less than three hours I fire up Black Ops and hopefully hit level 45 soon. Unless my roomie is watching TV. Then it’s Age of Empires.
Part of why I do play CoH is because it’s so solo friendly and easy to go AFK without worrying about bad guys popping up on top of you or anything. And the death penalties are such a joke that if it does happen, it’s not a big deal. When I have a block of time, I can join a team and do more intensive stuff and other times I run solo and get up at a moment’s notice.
I play mainly in the later evenings when the kids are asleep and while the wife is wrapped up in reality TV programs I have zero interest in.
I have a 2.5 hour round trip commute (walking and train, so I don’t have to drive, thank goodness). I have no kids. I don’t watch much TV. And my girlfriend is also a gamer.
So I get my exercise, cooking, internet time, and various chores in, but I usually can spend a fair amount of time gaming each week as well.
I’m also in a biweekly tabletop RPG.
I only have a 30 minute commute and my work schedule is so that I work basically 10 days in a row, weekend off, then 10 days in a row again and a week off. The first two days of my week off is catching-up-on-chores time, the rest is for play and socializing.
Another thing is that I only play single-player games these days, having tired of both CS and WoW. The pause button is a great help, in that I can just step off the couch whenever something needs doing or the missus wants a word. The other good thing is, of course, that the missus is also into gaming and programming, so we’ll either be both in front of our monitors or one of us’ll be reading a book or watching a movie. (We’re both very self-contained people without the need for constant socializing in our relationship. Of course there are times when we want the other’s attention, but we’re quite able to make that clear when it’s so.)
MC.
Just wait for a period of time when you are really sick but not so that you need to have bed rest 24/7.
Or I just sacrifice some sleeps. It also help that I have become really really choosy about the games I have played. For example, this year the only game I have sunk lots of time into is just Witcher 2.
