7 Tips for Responsibly Balancing Life with Skyrim

It’s 11/11/11, and that can mean only one thing: Every waking moment of your life is about to be invested into the beast known as Skyrim. This is a game that, at least theoretically, never ends.

As fantastical as the world of Skyrim is, we are unfortunately adults. The days of playing video games until our eyeballs explode are behind us. Now our lives are filled with chores, and something called responsibility. As adults and gamers, we owe it to ourselves to avoid becoming the stereotype of neglectful gamers that society is quick to criticize us as being. You know the kind: the obsessed adult gamer who forgets to change diapers (both their own and their baby’s) and walk among regular humans with a face stained orange from the chemical reaction caused by the tears of Aeris’s death mixed with a beard of Cheeto crumbs.

We want to help you battle that stereotype. While balancing life and Skyrim may seem like a circus feat only those enrolled in Cirque du Soleil University can excel in, this isn’t true! Keep reading for some secret tips to maintain a healthy and balanced life.

Tip #1: Take an Hourly Break

This is probably something you should be doing anyways. Set an alarm to go off hourly to snap you out of your Skyrim coma. It might even be beneficial to hire a young neighbor to throw a brick through your window and shout threats into your ear tunnel. Whatever you need to do, take frequent breaks to ensure your life hasn’t hit rock bottom and your loved ones are still alive.

Tip #2: Remember to P.O.O.P.

It’s always a good thing to remember. For those of you who might not know, P.O.O.P stands for:

Pause your game
Occupy the bathroom
Open your soul
Poop

This is an acronym that’s pasted all over Korean Internet cafes, and is something the Western audience needs to adopt into their gaming lifestyle. Taking bathroom breaks in Skyrim is great, but real life is what matters. When your stomach begins to produce noxious fumes after your fifteenth refried bean burrito, just remember to P.O.O.P.

Tip #3: Hire a Life Intern

With the job market looking relatively slim, now is a great time to give a strapping young lad the chance to embrace responsibility – more specifically, your responsibility.

Contact a local university and let them know that you have one of the finest opportunities known to mankind. It’s high-level, engrossing, and an experience of a lifetime. You’ll get a flood of responses back. After all, the students applying to be your internship surely aren’t playing Skyrim themselves, which means they have some sort of goal in life.

Once you have the intern in your grasps, let them know that they are on the cusp of becoming an adult, all they need to do is survive in an office setting for six-eight months or however long it takes you to complete an infinite number of quests. They’ll excel in your position while you dutifully romance everyone in Skyrim without becoming jobless. Once you put Skyrim to bed, you’ll be able to return to your life as if nothing ever happened.

Tip #4: Turn Skyrim into a Political Movement

Kids will occupy anything these days. Thus, Skyrim is the ideal vehicle for the newest and grooviest political movement. Go onto your favorite news aggregator site (reddit, duh) and post about how dragons aren’t paying their fare amount of taxes and there’s too much backdoor negotiations going on that need to stop before some Ice Dragon destroys the Internet. This cry for action will trigger a digital movement that will spread across the globe like the Furby craze.

As the leader of this movement, urge your followers to Occupy Skyrim. Use hashtags and social media to get your message out. Once the dust settles, millions of your brethren will be occupying Skyrim in a political movement that will inspire hundreds of thousands to do the same. Finally, those dragons will begin to pay taxes instead of hoarding gold like the scaly serpents they are.

Tip #5: Really Make Everyone Else Feel Inadequate

While some may judge you for pouring every once of life into a fantasy world, you shouldn’t be ashamed. After all, everyone has a a vice that justifies living. Why else would people allow themselves to work in a hell hole like Piki Geek cubicle farms? You’ll need to bring everyone else down to your level of shame to let them know that indulging in video games isn’t any different than eating a box of chocolate or hiding a corpse in your backyard.

Hire a private detective to dig up some grotesque dirt on your friends, family, and co-workers. Once you’ve compiled a dossier that would disgust the devil himself, hold a reverse intervention. (A reverse intervention is when you invite those people you collected dirt on over and grill them about their habits for hours.) At the end of the event, they’ll understand that it’s A-okay to play a video game. You’ll then be free to play Skyrim without any repercussions whatsoever.

Tip #6: Apply for a Skyrim Grant

Grants are a dime a dozen these days, and there’s no reason why you can’t receive a grant for playing Skyrim. Heck, I received a grant just for typing this very sentence! Your ticket to a life revolving around Skyrim is one small grant proposal away. A successful proposal will pose a theory to scientist that cause them to throw their clipboards and lab coats into the air with unbridled glee. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

• Can a human live off of the food found in Skyrim?
• Can Skyrim answer what came first: the chicken or the egg?
• Can Skyrim help understand the connection between dragons and swords?
• Can Skyrim help understand why video games make dudes so much more attractive to ladies?
• Can Skyrim explore the relationship between virtual avatars and their real life players in a way that would make James Cameron stop creating movies?

Tip #7: Don’t play Skyrim

Look, there’s a point in our lives where we have so many balls to juggle that adding a boulder into the mix just isn’t possible. Maybe your time with Skyrim isn’t right? Perhaps you should focus on providing for you family, trying to succeed in a job that doesn’t love you, and following the carefully laid path in your life just like your forefathers did. It’s probably better this way. You know Christopher Columbus never would have sailed across the ocean if he had Skyrim to play. And George Washington would be too busy sleighing dragons to found America.

What I’m saying is, if you choose to not play Skyrim it better be because you’re founding a country that A) has an economy that revolves around the playing of Skyrim and B) Has a holiday that is ten times more delicious than Thanksgiving.