Lately, my younger brother has taken up golf. He's always had a knack for anything involving fine or gross motor skills, which is strange, given that we share half our genes. So now he's out at the driving range or on the public course a few days a week, where, his wife told mine, he often spends five hours at a stretch.

"God," my wife said, "I would love it if Dan had a hobby that got him out of the house for five hours."

I did, once. I used to engage in various activities that involved leaving the house: travel, volunteer work, scuba diving, public drunkenness. Since I started working gainfully as a screenwriter, these have largely fallen by the wayside. I hope to get back to the first two someday soon, and every now and then I still manage a few hours of the last, but I now spend most of my dwindling recreation time watching movies or playing video games on the couch that is located right in the middle of our condo's living room.

My wife's comment was probably aimed at the video games. With movies, she's usually planted on the couch with me, and she's not the kind of person who points hypocritical fingers; she's from Minnesota, where hypocrisy is frowned upon. Video games, though, she's never particularly liked. She doesn't mind watching the more whimsical, visually innovative ones for a few minutes—like Psychonauts, Fable, or Shadow of the Colossus.

But playing head-to-head against me always frustrates her. She says it's because she is no good at them, and she doesn't like losing.

Of course, I'm not any good at them either. I regularly have to abandon games with no "Easy" setting because I get stuck three-quarters of the way through. Recently, my brother returned from his morning round of golf to beat me six times in a row on Tecmo Bowl, the classic Nintendo football game, which we played on the Wii he gave me as a wedding present; he destroyed me, even when I was playing the Ditka-era Bears and he was playing the pre-Manning Colts. I've spent hundreds of hours on Xbox LIVE, Microsoft's online service that allows you to square off against gamers from around the world, playing multiplayer Halo (in which players become cyborg supersoldiers, killing the shit out of each other) and Gears of War (in which players become both human and monstrous alien supersoldiers, killing the shit out of each other with chain saws). These hours have taught me a grim lesson about what would happen to me in any real combat situation. And in spite of her alleged frustrations, my wife used to beat me consistently at driving games like RalliSport Challenge and Project Gotham Racing, until she decided she didn't like winning video games much more than she liked losing them.

I have learned to give up on things I'm not good at. My years of half-assed but dutiful participation in youth sports ended when I was 14, after a semester spent as the worst pole vaulter anyone in my high school had ever seen—people could jump higher than I could vault. It was then that I decided to rethink my choice of pastimes and better align them with my talents. Unlike Tecmo Bowl or pole vaulting, my writing seemed to improve slightly for every few hundred hours I spent doing it. After 15 years, this pastime mutated into a job.