Fallout 4 broke single-day sales records last month, shipping 12 million units, totaling about $750 million, on its first day alone. To a lot of people, it might look like the games have taken over my life. I could have used that time to do any number of other things in the real world: exercise more often, read a shelf full of classic novels, or write a good chunk of a book.

That’s 15 days I’ve spent roaming virtual fantasy landscapes, having conversations with strange and colorful characters, fighting demons and robots, developing in-game abilities for my character, collecting weapons and trinkets, and improving the various pieces of armor my character wears through in-game crafting systems. That’s an incredible amount of time - more than 15 complete days of my life since 2009, when I first started playing the games. I spent dozens, in some cases hundreds, of hours playing each of those games, too: All together, I estimate I’ve spent about 375 hours on them, not including what I’ve put into Fallout 4. I knew this would be the case when I bought the game, because I’ve played previous games from Bethesda Softworks, the studio behind the Fallout franchise: the fantasy RPGs in the Elder Scrolls series, Morrowind and Skyrim, which share many gameplay mechanisms and design elements with the Fallout series, as well as the game’s predecessors, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas (which was created by a different studio, Obsidian, under a license from Bethesda). By the time you read this, my tally will almost certainly be even higher.

That’s 57 hours and change - almost one and a half workweeks - since the game arrived on my doorstep, and an even larger percentage of my waking hours. I know this because the game keeps track and tells me every time I start it up. Two days, nine hours, and 17 minutes - that’s how long I’ve spent playing Fallout 4, the post-apocalyptic role-playing video game, since its release on November 10.

Fallout 4 play as a super mutant