How common is it to play a video game so long that you get blisters?

No.

I don’t know.

Of course. How many joysticks have you ripped in half trying to do sudden evasive maneuvers? I ripped at least three in half trying to dodge incoming guided missiles in Encounter…

Yes. they ended up needing expert couselling.

I’ve only gotten blisters from doing a lot of physical manual labor, raking leaves, shoveling, that kind of thing.

I’ve been playing video games pretty much my entire life. I cut my teeth on an Intellivision and Atari 2600 back in the day and have been playing ever since. Even to this day I might, on a lazy, nothing-else-to-do kinda day, play on my PS4 for several hours throughout the run of the day (on the other hand I might go a week without touching it sometimrs). But I have never played to the point where my hands start to blister.

You’ve been playing video games pretty much your entire life, @Darth_Algar ?

Not yet you haven’t.

Umm, ok.

I have been playing off and on over a period of forty years, which is the majority of my life.

Galaga was my fave for quite a while, mostly because my brother told me the key to the back door.
Now that I have physical limitations and fog brain days, I find my Xbox to be quite beneficial. There are games which can show me if I am functioning well cognitively, and Kinectimals helps me get a decent workout without harm. And I get to pet the cute critters.

That said, yes, there have been a couple of times I’ve gotten blisters. Mostly from playing snowboarding with Shaun White while my daughter was at school so I could do some of the tricks she was doing much better than me. I can’t walk across the street, but I can shred the hell out of a mountain!

I think it really depends a lot on the game, the controller, and how the player holds and uses the controller.

I hurt my hand in an arcade game called Combat School. It was just a track ball with two or less buttons. I believed that it was exercising ones hands to build strength ,so was literally Combat School.

I know some customers who cut themselves on the Golf arcade game , that is usually in bars.

I have played NES Gauntlet for a couple of days straight when I was in junior high, and melted the power cord and still never finished the game. I got to level 181 and the adapter was melting so I decided to stop.

I can’t remember when I got blisters playing video games, but it was most likely to be between grade 3 and grade 9.

Sometimes I would get so into an arcade game that I was very sweaty. I don’t do that anymore.

“and melted the power cord and still never finished the game. I got to level 181 and the adapter was melting so I decided to stop”

Not that it really matters now, but that’s more of a sign of an overloaded power circuit than you playing too much. Baring a defect in manufacture the A/C adapter shouldn’t melt no matter how long you’ve been playing. I can’t imagine what else must have been ran off that circuit if a game console was pulling too much juice.

@Darth_Algar Only the televison and clock radio where on , with the Nintendo. It wasn’t the original adapter, but a $20 universal adapter that I needed whenever my dad would take away my NES official adapter to punish me.

I am getting such a good laugh from this thread!

Just picturing someone, and their actions, when their equipment starts melting away…

RDG, I’m so glad you posted this! My day really needed the lift.

Using an ad hoc adapter for a video game console can be a problem – they often had custom power supplies and were not engineered to work with something different. Especially if you’re playing to level 181 on Gauntlet.

Gauntlet “the elf shot the food” was one of the first adventure games I remember that had the now-fairly-common “you died, but you can insert a quarter to not be dead and keep playing where you left off” system. The at-home versions I saw would just let you push a button to keep going, which seemed to me to really make the game rather pointless. But now for decades SO many adventure games have had that “savescum” design… sigh. And Gauntlet just keeps giving you more levels forever AFAIK.