I Treated My Unhealthy Gaming Obsession with More Games | Hacker News Reader

I Treated My Unhealthy Gaming Obsession with More Games

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65 pointsvalprop165 comments

There was a period in time of my life where I would say I was addicted to games. Looking back, it was 100% a response to trauma. Once I was in a better spot in my life, my gaming scaled way back to something more reasonable. Sometimes now, I will go weeks without playing anything.

My own experience is why I believe a lot of addictions find their roots in trauma. I was trying to escape the real world and found something better in the virtual.

I couldn't agree more with your points.

In my case, gaming was response to depression. I would play immersive or competitive games.

Those would 100% hijack my brain so it couldn't focus on anything else. I especially love RTS games as they demand more attention that you have. Inadvertently making all your problems 'go away' (for a time).

I think for most people, its not trauma but rather nothing interesting going on in their lives.

This, or the extension of it: the interesting things take more friction. I could start a programming project I had an idea for, practice vector art, read some technical blog posts I have bookmarked, but I often don’t. I probably average 3 hours a day of time wasted on Reddit and YouTube because there’s so little friction. I can pull my phone out of my pocket and navigate in the browser before I even consciously know what I’m doing. I’m 99% sure I don’t have trauma, and my childhood was almost as privileged as it gets.

It's downtime for the brain. I think we need it.

You could also go on 45 minute walks.

It doesn’t feel like downtime. My brain isn’t resting, it’s jumping from topic to topic parsing information for dopamine hits. It’s a totally different experience from stepping away from the devices and just being with your thoughts which is why is refreshing, rather than draining.

Some most interesting thoughts are not less draining, than video games.

Lack of human contact is a form of trauma -- it's used as the basis for almost all forms of torture and punishment.

It doesn't have to be just trauma, but a therapist once told me, "any time you see someone overindulge in anything -- food, drugs, gambling -- ask yourself 'what are they medicating'"

People rarely engage in self harmful behaviors without any reason.

Indeed, playing video games after traumatic experiences has been studied for reducing disturbing flashbacks with promising results [1, 2]. These cases specifically used Tetris, but it seems like any game that leads to a flow state would help. My guess is that playing games you already know is better than learning a new game.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... [2] http://europepmc.org/article/MED/28348380

For me it is just the act of doing something. Reading, working, cooking, talking, flying a kite, playing a game, etc. all engage my mind and are relaxing. It doesn't matter what the activity actually is. Sitting still is tortue. I would rather do something I don't like to do than nothing at all.

There are different reasons why I’ll go through periods of prolonged gaming. The first is that I’m looking for something to unwind with - gaming can be a quiet, solo activity that lets me just tackle objectives or challenges in a fairly linear fashion. If your job involves a lot of talking in meetings all day or context switching, this can be therapeutic.

But I’ve also recognized that I will often turn to gaming when I’m not being challenged enough or fulfilled enough elsewhere. Recently I went through a year at work where I was pretty much coasting, and therefore being able to knock out several games or keep pace with friends in multiplayer titles replaced that sense of fulfillment I would normally have gotten from work that mentally stimulated me.

> But I’ve also recognized that I will often turn to gaming when I’m not being challenged enough or fulfilled enough elsewhere.

I feel your pain.

Games are incredible good creating challenges and rewarding effort. Both things are quite lacking in the corporate world.

I think this is really insightful into my own behaviour around gaming. I used to be an avid gamer, but over the last year or two I've been too busy at work, working on my own side projects/startup. I've always thought I didn't have time for gaming, but I think more accurately it's that I've been getting fulfillment elsewhere.

I really relate to this. I gamed excessively through high school and parts of college (think thousands of hours a year), largely as I just couldn't think of anything better to do. More than anything it was just embarassing as it made me into the worlds least interesting man which probably compounded the issue, almost all my free time went into a bunch of games most people don't even know about. I feel a lot better about myself now I can point to side projects or similar when somebody asks what I've been up to.

I also think the pandemic has changed some of my behaviors as well. I used to enjoy playing on PC at my desk a lot, but now that I work at the same desk for ~8 hours a day, spending more time there at night is incredibly unappealing. I've been getting some enjoyment out of playing a console on the couch, but even then my volume is way down.

This was certainly the case for me over the last year and a half. Up until the start of this year when I switched to a new, challenging job, I dove deep into a competitive shooter hole. I played ranked modes when available and focused a lot of mental effort into self-critiquing my play to improve. Making progress was the driving factor to keep playing, and I did see a lot of progress!

In the last six months I switched jobs into one that's more demanding of my time and mental efforts, and my gaming volume dropped significantly. I haven't booted any of the multiple-hours-per-day games I got into for the last couple of months.

What do people think about internet addiction? My mind has fallen apart - now I read comments on ycombinator and reddit, and I cannot even watch a TV show because of how bad my attention is. It's like I have trained myself to consume opinions on articles, without reading the actual articles. It's horrible. I hate internet addiction - and nobody talks about it. People write about odd internet communities - but few people write about television addiction, or internet addiction. I do not even have the capability of sitting down and playing a game because of my mind being so stupid and shallow.

I don't have much to add to this, but I relate completely. I can feel myself mentally deteriorating as I repeatedly choose to take the path of least resistance for optimum entertainment, which in turn just leads to increased boredom.

It's probably because it's harder to draw a line between normal and unhealthy internet usage, and it overall isn't as stigmatized as say, a social media or gaming addiction. You can imagine a very clear stereotype of those people and it's effects.

Personally, I'm absolutely ashamed of it, and that's probably why not many people talk about it? Earlier this week, I was working on a personal project and after writing like 5 lines of code, I would instinctively open reddit and see the same posts I had already read. This probably happened like 10 times until I actually thought about what I was doing, and I felt absolutely pathetic, like my brain was just a zombie. It just feels like such a... stupid thing to have problems with.

> Ferguson then tells me that dopamine levels raise about 50 to 100 percent when you play a game for the first time, and that’s a totally normal response to any pleasurable activity: from eating pizza to having sex (compare that to methamphetamine use, which can that raise levels by 1,300 percent). By contrast, dopamine-wise, it’s fine to play a game, and you won’t have the same regrets afterwards from eating pizza or (maybe) from sex.

This sounds like pop science but might actually be real science- would like to know if there's any sort of listing out there determining how much dopamine is elevated by different activities.

With all of the "dopamine fasting" fads online these days the future will probably be quantifying dopamine effects with very unscientific scientific-seeming popular estimation techniques, possibly aided by wearables. Dopamine diets, dopamine retreats, dopamine fat camps.

And yet, maybe studying this field is one way to solve the overstimulation problem. It's not as if smartphones and junk food are exclusively a province of the developed world.

> This sounds like pop science but might actually be real science- would like to know if there's any sort of listing out there determining how much dopamine is elevated by different activities.

Unfortunately that wouldn't prevent it from being pop science. What does it mean that "dopamine is elevated"? Elevated where, how was it measured, and what is the supposed effect of it being elevated?

It is true that amphetamines work by increasing dopamine in specific areas of the brain, but that doesn't mean the rest of this is valid. Also note that pretty much everything else people say about neurotransmitters is bunk, depression is not caused by lack of serotonin and more doesn't make you happier.

What is depression caused by, in your opinion?

I have my own view, just want to see if yours is similar to mine or is interesting in some other way.

No idea. All we know is that antidepressants probably don’t work by increasing serotonin levels.

There's actually research around this. I don't have references to any of the papers I read 10+ years ago, but the field is ripe with data since it's gotten easier to measure things.

One of the surprising results in this area, is that contrary to what was believed 20 years ago, dopamine levels rise prior to an anticipated reward. That is to say, we learn that some thing that our body "really wants" is coming and the brain gets flooded with dopamine before the thing is introduced into our body, or the event actually happens. So, like with sugary food, dopamine will peak before we've ingested it, possibly before we even even put the food in our mouth. This was a very unexpected discovery based on how we thought dopamine worked. This is why ritual can be so important for a lot of behaviors, the repeated actions create an anticipatory effect in the brain that allows for sort of a bigger positive feedback loop.

I wish I could find the paper it was a big enough deal, I thought it might be easy to google. Here's a paper from around the period I was thinking in any event if you are actually interested in how these things are measured. "Dopamine in motivational control: rewarding, aversive, and alerting" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3032992/ That will lead you to over 266 referenced papers, and I'm sure the ability to measure has only gotten better in the last 10 years. I will warn you though, this is a total rabbit hole. I used to casually study neurobiology, and it's an amazingly fascinating topic.

This article really points out that nearly anything can constitute an addictive substance, if abused. Which isn't a very novel observation, but it does make one wonder- what is it about modern society that leads to so many addictions? Why are we so stressed and depressed? Or is it just the availability of these substances makes it easier to self-soothe, whereas in the past people were too busy surviving or lived austerely so they had to meditate or embrace stoicism.

I would argue that we're noticing mental health problems because in most cases survival is not an issue in modern society. This is not to claim mental health problems didn't exist prior but there was an interesting podcast about suicide and how it affects people more from good backgrounds that don't have the level of success that their peers have.

I assumed you were wrong that wealthier people would be more at risk for committing suicide, because this sounds like an interesting but believable bit of folklore trivia, but this study suggests you are right.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC26575/

See heading titled “Comment”.

Honestly, probably the atomisation of the individual. We're fundamentally a social species but our current cultural moment is very antisocial.

I was somewhat surprised to see “gamification” on the SEC’s recent list of priorities:https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eAgendaMain?operation=OPER...

I think only part of it is all of our newfound free time and easy access. There’s definitely an element of companies “optimizing” for engagement though, too.

I think that's very specifically from people complaining about the confetti in the Robinhood app. I'm not sure it's that "gamified" otherwise - Robinhood simply has an easier to use UI than something like eTrade and Schwab which just love tables and have no information hierarchy.

I think we have become detached from nature and all that it serves up. Open spaces, boredom, the purposefulness and purposelessness of all things... These are a few of the things we lose.

I suspect the millions of years have wired our brains to expect the ever-presence of nature, to feed on, rely on it. It is the world of the past century or so that we were not designed for.

Countries are talking about gambling packs that you can buy for different games. Although that is an issue I'm more worried about all the other things those companies do. Especially BR's are incredibly toxic and addictive. The random aspect of each round, not knowing if you will land on the ultimate gear on drop, or having to fight tooth and nail with scrapes and still turn up victories I think is way more addictive then currently on the radar of those countries.

Besides that all of those F2P games make you invest in their ecosystem. Battle pass here, skin there. Free unlocks when you play certain game modes. That is the real crack, including unhealthy conditioning.

So if you are working for companies like Respawn, EA or Epic (or similar). Scratch yourself behind the ears. I would say I don't have an addictive tendency, but the amount of effort it cost me to get away from apex is higher then I would like to admit. I noticed playing those games didn't made me happy anymore, but I still felt like I've invested so much in it that I had to keep going.

I'm happy that the game had so many terrible design choices for me to make it easier to step away. But the moment these companies figure that out as well, I think they will trap even more customers

People claim that Apex Legends employs "Engagement-based match-making" (EBMM) instead of pure skill-based match-making. The supposed point of EBMM is to rig your games to keep you optimally engaged, as you can't just get winning games all the time.

This claim is based on some EA whitepaper on the topic plus the players' own observations of the match-making system.

I can't support or deny this claim as I haven't looked into EBMM, but the terrible match-making system is what turned me off of Apex.

EBMM sounds like somewhat skill based but with a twist. It makes sense, games where you constantly win or lose are boring. Skill based matchmaking probably doesn't work as well for games that have a lot of random elements that favor or disfavor players of the same skill level.

Yup. I started doing lichess this past year. I'm not really into chess, but I had a lot of fun moving from 900 to 1400. Beyond that improving was a real struggle because all of my opponents were equally matched, and playing tilted or tired would cause me to lose, repeatedly, very quickly, and suffer a big drop in rank. It was not fun at all so I quit.

Of course if you're trying to devise a serious ranking, fun isn't what you're optimizing for.

Same, made a similar rating jump. Chess is challenging, fun, and at times really frustrating. I lost 12 games in a row yesterday and rage canceled my chess.com membership and decided to take a hiatus. It’s not so much losing 50/50 for me it’s losing 8+ games in a row that sucks. I always say I’ll take a break after losing 3 in a row but then I’m paired with someone 200 points lower and figure it should be an easy match… not always the case. You gotta be at the top of your game to even keep your rating which isn’t always fun. At least I usually improve after a rating dip and a break.

The biggest problem with skill based matchmaking is that you eventually reach a point where you only win half of your games. There are days the struggle is appreciated, but some days that's just not fun - especially considering that it's an average and you'll have dry streaks. A lot of players hate it, they'd rather have a noob stomp, while others like the struggle.

The old days where you joined servers, got to know names, and formed communities offered a lot more than win/lose stats. Ultimately, I would say that is far more "engaging" but they neither want to run servers for us nor let us do it ourselves anymore.

It doesn't sound bad, but the EA paper is actually talking about a way to manipulate people into spending money. What they do is match you with lower ranked players after you've made a purchase, that way you feel like your purchase is justified and want to spend more money. It also encourages the lower ranked people to spend more because they see that they're losing to someone who paid for better players on their FIFA team.

These techniques aren't tightly restricted trade secrets or anything. Companies talk very openly about their techniques at conferences. They see engagement (or less charitably, addiction) as a laudable goal and I can sympathize with that - there are lots of activities that people find 'addicting' which aren't viewed negatively by society (running, knitting, sudoku, baking, etc).

Anyhow, here's a talk on engagement based matchmaking in Halo 5: https://youtu.be/0FoG4Jtpebs

I don't like BR games, but I do like roguelikes, and the randomness of each start has a similar appeal. BR is a multiplayer roguelike. If it is addictive, it's because it's a fun design approach.

For anyone feeling addicted to a particular game, I would recommend getting into single player games. Going from hundreds of hours of Overwatch to games such as Breath of the Wild, Subnautica, Nier Automata, and more is so much more fun. In particular, I give my highest recommendation to a game called Outer Wilds, a 20 hour or so scifi game that is a cross of reading Isaac Asimov while playing Kerbal Space Program and has become my number one game of all time.

If I had this problem, I would probably try playing fitness related games and VR, or play while only exercising on a stationary bike. This would put a physical limit in how long I could play, and add health benefits of exercise. Mitigating damage is a good strategy. If I overeat one day, I'll try to skip breakfast the next day. Has worked for me.

Not a bad idea but as someone who plays sports near-obsessively as a coping mechanism, overuse injuries are no joke. A former girlfriend of mine had no cartilage left on either shoulder at 20 years old due to years of competivive handball on painkillers and anti-inflamatories. I'm a candidate for a few cirurgies in the next year myself.

Totally unrelated, but handball is virtually unknown in the US. I learned about it only because of an elementary school gym teacher who was obsessed with it.

Some people say it's too offensively focused to be a good spectator sport, but basketball is that way too.

If this is the handball that involves playing tennis against the wall with your hand, and allowing only one bounce. If so, I loved this so much when I was a kid. My favorite game playing in grade school against other kids.

Nope. It's more like basketball with the net on the ground:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x0xwegHBG8

There is one point in this article that I wholeheartedly agree with—that addictive behavior is invariably a response to some underlying psychological issue. I played games addictively from childhood and it was obviously a coping mechanism for anxiety and depression. However, there were numerous times where the gaming itself exacerbated the problems, as I simply used gaming to forget about urgent demands instead of facing them.

Now in my mid-30s I was recently diagnosed with ADHD, and the medication has had the effect of basically eliminating all desire to play games. I still have a lot of the same obsessive behavioral patterns, but the need for a constant drip of dopamine rewards has dramatically abated so I can focus on more meaningful pursuits.

My favorite way to break a gaming obsession is find hacks for it. As soon as I can game the game, the addiction mechanism is broken, and I can go on with my life. Of course this only works on single-player mode game addictions.

Also, getting married to a casual gamer and having a full-time job breaks game addictions pretty quickly too. When you find yourself caught within the clutches of a game, your inner voice saying "what the hell else do I need to be doing right now" is a lot louder with those pre-commitments.

Exhaustion is a good strategy to kick behaviors. Play until you are absolutely sick of playing.

Or until you're too old to play anymore :)

Ha ha, in fact I am waiting to get in to gaming when I am too old to do anything else.

Same with all the TV shows people talk about — too busy, I'll catch up on Game of Thrones when I am wheelchair-bound.

This can work for me but it tends to reset after sleeping. Taking it further, it also tends to just make me sick of that game which just means it's time to find another. And a theme park MMO like FFXIV will always have something else to do, so I'll just start on a weird new obsession like collecting all of something.

I think there's a lot to what the others are saying that it's an easy way to find "fulfillment" when it's otherwise lacking or feels too hard to reach. Which of course can make it a self-perpetuating spiral as it blocks achievement in other areas of life.

I feel like it has to do with the games themselves. And it's not just the sketchy dark patterns, it's the whole way that games are designed, bigger and more immersive. The social and competitive aspects are huge as well. I completely swore off gaming for awhile due to how addictive it was for me. Then when Nintendo came out with their tiny little NES anthology device, I thought I'd try again.

Retrogaming is awesome.

You go from pushing power to playing the game in 5 seconds. No intro level or cutscenes giving you a feeling of sunk cost.

They are designed for you to walk away from. When you die, game over, no reason to continue immediately.

They often have a shocking amount of depth. Looking at this games now as an adult vs when I was a child makes me appreciate so many more details and layers of complexity.

Its a shame we generally refer to this as retro gaming, because what it really is is a collection of design sensibilities that deserve to make a comeback. There are still some indie developers working like this. Braid comes to mind as a game that feels like this.

Point being, I don't think that gaming has to be as damaging as it is now, and I think its deeper than just all the engagement and microtransaction crap, its into the core of how games are designed.

>Its a shame we generally refer to this as retro gaming

We don't. Retro gaming is largely an aesthetic style. There are dozens of games like what you describe released every year.

Is there a word for this style of game? I don't think "indie games" would be accurate since games from Indies span genres and styles.

For FPS games, "Boomer Shooter" is the common term because they're similar to the types of games "Boomers" played when they were kids.

Which is an odd association to make, since only the very youngest boomers would have even had a chance to play a shooter while under 20, which would have been what, 1983?

Which is why I'm trying to think of some descriptions of such game unlike retro or boomer that aren't linked to a point in time or a generation so much as linked to an actual set of design values.

“Boomer” is a tongue-in-cheek label used by Gen-Zers for anyone in the millennial generation (or older).

They are talking about the 30 year old boomer, its a 4chan meme. He drinks monster zero ultra, plays quake, mows the lawn at 5am, etc. The meme is subtle and sophisticated incorporating multiple levels of irony.

Not really. It's more that genres tend to fit within this design ethos. Retro games like the ones you described included a lot of platformers for instance.

edit: why would people downvote this question above?

Maybe you would prefer "casual gaming".

That certainly is my preference for games these days: pick up, play, drop in 5 minutes.

The problem there is that casual is mostly associated with Farmville type games. The style I'm thinking is more defined by a level of difficulty and unforgivingness that I wouldn't call casual.

Have you played the latest Doom games, or the Demon's Souls / Dark Souls / Bloodborne series? They're basically what you describe, all gameplay, no cutscenes, punishing challenge.

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