Sorry for another long post, but I wanted to comment on the college gaming discussion as well, and wanted to separate this diatribe from the other one.
As a rising Junior in college, I have no idea what the crew was talking about when they said they had way more time to game in college. That is NOT my experience AT ALL. Granted, I'm an Engineering major, which is notorious for having lots of work, but I know that at least a few of the RFN crew majored in Engineering or Computer Science, so I don't quite understand why their experience was so different than mine.
I have way more work to do in college than I did in high school, and I was no slouch in high school. The majority of my high school schedule was honors and AP classes, all of which assigned ample work. Freshman year, I felt it was a step up in work, if only slightly. But Sophomore year the **** hit the fan. I had so much work to do this past year.
If a day went by where I didn't do an assignment for one class or another, it meant I forgot about something. And they weren't short assignments either. I remember several Signals and Systems assignments that took 8-12 hours to do. And I once had a Circuits Lab write up that took me 16 hours to do over the course of a week. Granted, those weren't assigned that often, but my Circuits professor used to assign a graded homework every class that would take 2-3 hours to do and sometimes required a PSPICE or MATLAB simulation of one of the problems.
Like Jonny said, there's a lot of self-study in college. But in my classes, I had graded homework assignments on top of that. Usually on a weekly basis, or in some classes, an assignment was due every class. In fact, for my Linear Algebra class last semester, I would often forgo the optional practice problems because I had a graded homework set or a MATLAB assignment to do, or probably a quiz to study for.
That's another big difference I've found is that in high school, I never studied for tests and still got straight As. In college, that's simply impossible. I spend HOURS studying for tests and probably even an hour or two studying for quizzes now. When I don't study enough, it'll be the difference between an A and a C.
Also... how the hell did you manage to have 5 day weekends or finish class by 10 am?! This upcoming semester is the first time in college that I've ever had a day completely off, and that's like a gift sent from heaven. I usually only have one day per week where I have only one or two classes, too. I've had Monday/Thursday schedules that start at 8:30 am and end at 7:00 pm with only a handful of breaks in between.
I definitely take college seriously though. I don't know many people who put more time into academics than I do. And it pays off for me, as I usually get high grades to show for all my hard work. But if I didn't put in all that work, I know my grades would be a lot worse.
This is not to scare Wilson, though. I still played games a lot Freshman year. Less so Sophomore year, but I'd still manage to fit it in occasionally. It was mostly social gaming though. I've played a LOT of Brawl and Mario Party these past few years, and my friends and I even played a bunch of single player games together Freshman year. I haven't really been able to play many new games during the semester though. I usually catch up on those during breaks.
I had the same fears as Wilson going into college, but despite having less time to game, these past 2 years have been the best years of my life. I don't want to leave. I definitely agree with the crew when they said that if you don't enjoy college, you're doing it wrong. Even if you have less time to game, you'll find other ways to have fun, especially if you find a great group of friends like I did. And you can still keep the hobby alive, like I did, it might just be a lesser part of your life.
So in short, if you're reading this Wilson, don't worry about having less gaming time in college. You probably will, but you probably won't really mind. You're still going to love the hell out of college. Good luck, take it seriously, and have the best years of your life.
... God DAMN I write a lot.