The acclaimed video game Dark Souls has become tremendously popular despite its rigorous composition that essentially puts the gamer into a world with no knowledge of what to do, forcing them to keep approaching menial tasks through a trial-and-error system that kills them after every misstep, forcing them to start over and labor over the same small problems until they solve them and move on.

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It doesn't sound fun to me either, but video games rarely do. What's amazing about this game is that if it's palyed well, it can still take 100 hours to finish. Here's what a person can do in 100 hours if they weren't spending it on Dark Souls:

Read 12.5 400-page books

Do 24,000 sets of 20 push ups 

Road trip from NYC to LA. And back again. 

Train for a marathon over 20 weeks (though I'm willing to bet in the Venn diagram of "marathon runners" and "Dark Souls gamers" there probably isn't a lot of overlap)

Start a blog and make 200 posts, which would make it a wildly current blog for pretty much a year

Work a minimum wage job and make $1,000 bucks

All this discussion stems from this Slate article which asks the question of whether or not a 100-hour video game is worthwhile. What the article and author seem to be actually asking is if video games at all are worthwhile, which I feel is a pretty dumb thing to discuss. Is flying a kite worthwhile? Is skydiving worthwhile? Is watching the entire series of 'The Wire' on DVD worthwhile? The fact that a video game lasts for 100 hours rather than 1 shouldn't really matter. 

I'm not trying to say that the other pursuits listed in bold above are any better or worse than playing a video game, but rather just that Dark Souls is a really, really, really long game that would probably cause me to chuck my TV out the window and maybe develop bed sores and a Mountain Dew addiction.