Hour outdoors: For my hour outdoors, I decided to write about it while I waited for my friend’s class to end. I was on campus and decided to walk around and enjoy the nighttime scenery. I was able to hear bugs chirping at night, the sounds of students talking and walking around campus and the sounds of other students in their loud cars which disturbed the relaxing environment I was trying to put myself into. Not being on media for this hour made me realize how long an hour can really feel when you don’t have something at your fingertips that can distract your mind to make the time go by faster. I liked how that hour felt longer than it really was because to me it felt like I could artificially extend the time I was outdoors by not wasting any of the time reading through things online who’s only purpose is to get as much engagement time as possible.
Hour online: The time I spent mediated online was way longer than one hour. I spent six hours playing the day one Kings Fall raid last Friday 8/26. During it we were all very energetic because we have been waiting for this moment for years since the first release of Kings Fall in the first game. We spent a lot of time yelling and arguing at each other and looking back at it now probably was not the best idea for a cooperative activity. When we would beat an encounter, we would all start yelling and cheering because of the large amount of time we spent at each encounter. Compared to our 19-hour session in February for that raid release this 6-hour session felt like nothing but after telling people about it who don’t play games like that I realized that maybe this could be a waste of time, but we spent those 6 hours talking and having fun so I have come to the conclusion that if it stays a twice a year thing making time for it in my schedule isn’t such a bad thing. We all live across the continent, so this is our main way of hanging out and talking to each other.
Learned: One of the main things I got from this experience was the appreciation I got for just spending an hour without any online distractions. Being able to just sit outdoors and walk around taking in what is around me for only an hour but having it feel like 2-3 hours was almost surreal to me. I feel a personal biased to being online since when I was growing up we would always be moving from place to place and playing games online with friends really helped me keep in contact with friends from different places and not have to feel totally alone when going to a new place because I knew that once I got online I would still have people to talk to and share memories with.