Gamer time/ real time? (repost)

I found this article from the old BSB page interesting so i’m reposting it.
have you ever started playing a game at night only to realize after not much gaming it’s morning. This is the phenomenon that I like to call gamer time vs real time.

About a few weeks ago I started a game called Kingdoms of amalur: reckoning on my PC. The game is a western RPG that depicts a world where occupants of said world follow a set path in life like a linear action game or a train on tracks. This is referred to fate in the story of the game. Every character in the story has a predestined fate that they themselves cannot change. It is at this point where the players character comes into the story. This character has died and has been brought back to life by a device known as the well of souls. He/she is also it’s first and seemingly only success at bringing back a mortal back to life, so he/she is a big deal among the the NPC’s. however the fact that this character is now reborn is not the strange thing. The new character has somehow after cheating death lost all fate connecting him/her to the status quo. Without a fate to follow like a blind man with a seeing eye dog the new creature can make his or her own decision in this new life. these decisions will however change the template for other characters in the story that he/she interacts with.

“something tells me she is gonna be important to my character”

OK you get the gist of the story i’ll not be spoiling anymore of it. I just wrote the above section to show you how interesting the story of this game is. I have had KOA:R in my videogame collection for a long time and only now started playing it so you could imagine my surprise when I found such an engrossing plot before me. The first night I clocked in about 4hrs of real time Gameplay and a few nights after that i clocked 14 hrs. The strange thing is it didn’t seem like that to me at the time when I was playing, it felt like I had just been gingerly questing for an hour or two.

This is the difference between gamer time and real time. Real time follows it’s own set path and will progress as it should, but when it comes to gamer time on the other hand it stalls and crawls along. Realistically the time passes the same but our minds have been tricked into thinking less time has passed because we have not reached to town B or we have not reached level A.

“what time is it again?”

So I can conclude gamer time can only be calculated by achievements set by the gamer playing said game. So if I play Naruto and my goal is to beat all the Hokages, no matter how much time has passed as long as i continue playing and that goal is not reached the time I experience will be warped by the effects of gamer time and i will feel like not much time has passed.

My question for this Article is what game have you played the longest in one sitting? Mine will has to be pokemon crystal on the Gameboy color. So many memories of sleepless nights before school as a kid