I Stayed Up All Night Playing
Video Games
by Kei Taichi
just, don’t go to sleep.” I replayed that mantra over
and over again in my head, hoping it would work.
How foolish I was…
11:30 PM
I still wasn’t sleepy, as I beat up bad guys in Spider
Man. I was having a blast! It was great, but I did wor-
ry about waking my parents up with screams of ex-
citement. Sometimes, I would stop playing and go
over to the fridge and eat a snack, and sometimes I
would switch out the game to play something else. I
felt free to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted
it.
I
played the PS4 all night to see how long I could
stay up playing the new Spider Man game. The
objective was simple: play video games all night to
document the effects of staying awake for as long as
possible. I began the experiment at 10:00 PM and I
lasted until 6:25 AM or so (I actually lost track of time
after crashing on my couch).
Before the experiment
The hard part about starting this experiment was
convincing my parents to believe this was actually
homework. Luckily, I thought of this beforehand,
and told my teacher, Mr. Van West, to write a note
explaining my journalistic experiment (I did this for
the love of investigative journalism, not for video
games). After seeing the note (and a bit of convinc-
ing), my parents finally agreed, and so began my
8-hour journey to not getting any sleep.
12:30 AM
I was starting to get a little tired, but that feeling didn’t
hold for long, because to counter the drowsiness, I
blasted “Girls just want to have fun” By Cyndi Lau-
per at full volume on my headset, while I was saving
New York City from the criminals on my screen. That
worked, because I was wide awake during this hour.
Sleepiness is a heck of an opponent, but I wasn’t go-
ing down without a fight (literally).
1:30 AM
As I sat there on my couch, in the complete and utter
darkness with the only source of light being my TV, I
completely forgot to check the time. When I looked
I was dumbfounded about how fast one hour had
passed. I guess I was just having so much fun that I
lost track of what time it was.
2:30 AM
At this point, I just wanted to lay down and relax, but
10:30 PM
I was ready. I had coffee in hand, my PS4 was boot- I knew if I did that I would fall asleep. I had to avoid
ing up and I said goodnight to my parents. I was sleep at all cost, so I took out my computer, put on
ready for the challenges that would await me. At first an action movie, and continued to play PS4.
I was so excited. I thought to myself “I can make it,