Could a student play at least one Mass Effect game or finish The Expanse during their 4 year college experience and still maintain a healthy social life or would that get in the way?
Perhaps getting interested in real spaceflight would be better. Tom Hanks and HBO’s series about the space race “From the Earth to the Moon” is excellent as well as movies like “First Man”, “Apollo 13”, and “The Right Stuff”.
There is also this series on Apple called “For All Mankind” and I enjoyed it more than I would have expected to.
First, there is no such thing as a “normal” college student.
Second, there are probably just as many college students who share your interests as there are who are interested in sports. College is where not only do geeks abound, it’s where geeks rule.
The number of students at any college who are interested in Sci Fi is larger than anybody could get to know within the four years of college. In fact, somebody could have a rich social life at most colleges by interacting socially with other Sci Fi fans. At small colleges there are hundreds of Sci Fi fans, and at large universities these number in the thousands.
For example, students at Middlebury college established Quidditch games back in 2005, and they are still very popular. Like the rest of the NESCACs, Midd is heavily into athletics, it’s very outdoorsy, and it also has a good number of preppy kids from the NE.
There is a reason that XKCD is as popular as it is.
In short, @CmdrShepN7Cmdr as you can see by the responses, there are geeks everywhere, and we not only graduate college, but married and have kids who are either in college or college bound.
Yes, and in fact, college may be the first place where you find your ‘tribe’ and realize that those things actually aren’t all that rare. I had a few other nerd friends in high school, but college is where I really met my nerd tribe - the anime fans, the sci-fi and fantasy fans, the gamers. I spent a significant amount of time playing Super Smash Bros. tournaments with my friends in college. (And now, I work in the video game industry and the entire company is my nerd tribe.)
You do have to be careful to balance your social life, your individual habits and interests, and your schoolwork, but I’d give that advice to anyone - I don’t think you are necessarily any more likely to waste too much time playing games than you are reading non-school books or watching TV and movies (when I barely slept the week of my oral exams, it was The Hunger Games books keeping me up, not games). If you mostly play single-player games, that definitely means not spending hours alone in your room playing games (or online MP games with randos) - I know we can get lost in the flow state, but you do need to find a save point/log off and go to the caf or something.
