In retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have looked.

I was 10 days into playing Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground – a little RPG I reviewed here last month – and I was poking around the "settings" menu. I noticed that it had a "time played" option, which shows you how long you've been toiling away at the game. Curious, I clicked it.

Thirty-six hours.

Upon which my heart sank into a fathomless pit. Thirty-six hours? How in god's name had I managed to spend almost four hours a day inside this game? I should point out that this was not the only game I'd been playing during that time. I'd also been hip-deep in BioShock and Space Giraffe, so I'd been planted like a weed in front of my consoles for hours more.

This is a missing-time experience so vast one would normally require a UFO abduction to achieve it.

So the question of the column, and possibly the question of my eternal soul, is: Is this good thing? How much does it change the architecture of your life to spend that much time playing games?

The dirty secret of gamers is that we wrestle with this dilemma all the time. We're often gripped by what I call "gamer regret" – a sudden, horrifying sense of emptiness when we muse on all the other things we could have done with our game time.

Frequently, it's precipitated by those ghastly "time played" counters. The "played" command in World of Warcraft is the worst. I've known gamers who nearly went into shock after discovering they'd spent an entire month in-game each year. (According to Nick Yee's research, amazingly, this is the average – 20 hours a week of play.)

My gamer regret usually takes the form of drawing up a humiliating list of other, potential activities I've forgone. I could have ... volunteered at a local hospital! Learned a language! Cleaned up my rats' nest of an office! Gotten a head start on a new writing project! Hell, I could have just, you know, played the guitar or something. Wouldn't that have been a less howling waste of my precious time on Earth?

Sometimes I think the inky depths of gamer regret are linked, in a fiendish calculus, to how totally awesome the game is. The higher you rise, the lower you fall. A really superb game sweeps you into its embrace because it offers a seductively controllable alternative to life. You're wrestling to master a system – a war, a puzzle, a mystery – that is enormously complex but, unlike the rest of our lives, actually masterable.

Will Shortz, the crossword puzzle expert, once told me that the reason people love pen-and-paper puzzles is that "life presents us with all sorts of problems that don't have any single answer – but with a crossword, there actually is one answer, and you can find it."

Yet, just like a crossword addict, when the game is over, we're left with – what? A sense of completion? Sure, except what we've completed could be regarded as a supremely arbitrary, nonproductive task. The elation I feel when I finish is always slightly tinged with a worrisome sense of hollowness. Wouldn't I have been better off doing something that was difficult and challenging and productive?

Except, wait a minute. That's just stupid, Puritan thinking. Videogames, like crosswords, are a form of play – and play is a key element of a healthy adult existence. As game theorist Raph Koster has always pointed out, our playful brains love to seek out patterns, to solve problems – and there's something existentially joyful about doing this in an environment that doesn't have any stakes if you screw it up.

Or here's a more radical way of putting it: Wasting time is one of the central reasons we play. If play were productive, it wouldn't be ... play. Monday Night Football doesn't achieve anything either.

On and on it goes, the argument with myself. Thirty-six hours, what's wrong with you? Hey, I only watch one hour of TV every two weeks. Everyone's got their way to chill out, and mine's far more mentally stimulating than television. You're ignoring your family! No, I'm not. When I play games, I do it in the wee hours; I'm ignoring sleep. But that's not healthy! Screw being healthy!

All right, so maybe it's OK to play some videogames, but only in moderation. Agreed, but what counts as "moderation"?

The truth is, gamers never settle this internal debate. We ask the question, only to fail to answer it. We repress it, only to have it suddenly rise back up and bite us – whereupon we wrestle with it, repress it, rinse and repeat.

And with that, I think I'm going to head out and sign up for some volunteer work at the local hospital.

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Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.