Apart from my pessimism being completely unfounded, there’s three things I’ve really taken away from DayZ:

1) Male footballers are even biggers arseholes than I thought they were. Seeing the passion, the excitement, in people who do their sport just for the enjoyment and get paid nothing for it was amazing. At first I thought it might be endemic in highly paid athletes, but Bolt, Ennis and the like are still fantastic, as are F1 and rugby players.

I mean, I really am in awe of how scummy footballers are now.

2) Continuing on the football point, I really hope someone animates the women’s final and then asks people to choose who they think played it when you can’t see the gender; a lot of people go “durr women’s sports are bad” but the quality of play was fantastic in that final (bar Japan’s near own goal).

3) Greater London transport links have held up phenomenally well. Why can’t they perform so admirably on my daily commute?

We’ve got the Olympics running on the television while I work, so that we can pop out of something and watch if a game gets really interesting, like Japan vs. China in women’s volleyball the other day or Hungary vs. Iceland in handball today.

I was up most of the night when Curiosity landed, putzing around on MMOs while waiting for the exciting moments on the NASA Channel. It brings back lots of fun times back in college, when a bunch of us would crowd around a television to watch something during a shuttle mission.

Honestly, the most fun has been Gen Chat these days. For example, when Lochte beat Phelps in their first swim event, discussion about that (and what’s up with the Aussies and why they’ve slipped over the last 8 years) dominated discussion on Gen Chat for an hour or two on Belsavius. That sort of thing would normally be found in Guild Chat, but when it leaks over to Gen Chat in a non-assholish manner, you know that the Olympics are big.

I had totally missed that it was happening that night and I had my very own pocket space geek giving me expert commentary!

Another unique MMO experience.

The one thing I really liked was Athens 2004. Digital channels were still a novelty, so the two public service broadcasters set aside their four digital channels and sent 96 hours of sports every day. I really liked getting insights into sports I’ve never seen before with full-length coverages of all events. (Even if some of them ran non-live during the night. What did I have a digital recorder software on my computer for?) Sadly, they’ve never done that since. Now, you just get to see what they choose, even if they nominally have more “web channels”.

Back to your original question though: I’ve been “playing” EVE quite a bit recently. That is, sitting docked, waiting for calls for a Quick Response Fleet to repel war targets out of our systems. That can get boring if you have nothing else to do, but it goes really well with watching sports on the side.