Blog post I wrote about video game addiction. Hope it resonates with someone :) Open to feedback
I understand the struggle of gaming especially when most of your life isn't going so great. The appeal of escapism is hard to bear, that's why on most of my computers I can't install any video games because I found when I said yes to Dota, I was saying no to greater priorities in life.
The thing I stopped being hard on myself however is considering that the time spent playing video games was entirely wasted. My 1,600+ hours playing Dota weirdly enough translated into video editing skills that now help with my job. The anger that I had playing the game caused me to deeply look into managing said emotion. The reflection that I had a problem meant that I could improve myself overall. Sometimes a metaphor, such as games, makes us realize the deep seated issues we had all along...
Great post.
I think for me, I would like to turn my many hours spent into a will and a way to help others deal with addiction to videogames, as well as porn and other digital addictions that are not yet taken quite as seriously as physical addictions.
I think that would be the ultimate way of making something good out of all this
If you sit around on the couch hyper focused on not playing the game, you will surely crack.
Eagerly anticipating this game has brought me back to my childhood days when playing the game I wanted seems like the ultimate fun, but of course now I have responsibilities. Now playing is a reward for myself if I handle everything else and again, only with friends. Even though I've been tempted dozens of times in the last month to fire it up for a solo session, that rule has stood me in good stead.
To be honest, I played it for a few hours and I found it to be way too complicated. I gave up after a few hours.
It’s _definitely_ not good enough to “fall off the wagon” for, seriously.
I would really rather not know.
I'm not addicted anymore, and I couldn't tell you what changed. I have a guess though; I think it was mobile games? But maybe not the way you might think. I got really hard in to some of the early mobile gacha games for a little while. Summoner's War was one of them, it's about 10 years old now. I spent some money on them; I have a tech job, and splashing a little cash on pulling the slot machine lever for powerful new monsters felt good for a little while. But those things were barely games, they were basically the absolute shortest, least ornate form of the hedonistic treadmill that you could offer and still call it a game, they were essentially just designed to form habits and get you addicted to a routine with predictable rewards, and then slowly dial back the rewards as you progress but also slowly dial up the number of advertisements for the in-game cash shop.
Regular pc/console games would at least try to hide the ways in which many games are grinds, they'd try to make an actual experience and give you value for your money and make you feel satisfied about your purchase. There's a lot of psychological tricks involved there, please don't get me wrong, pc or console gaming isn't free of that kind of predation at all (especially these days). But with mobile gaming, that's almost all there is. It's like the difference between going to a nice restaurant and having a couple glasses of wine with dinner vs going to a 24 hour liquor store at 3am and buying a case. At the liquor store, there's no music playing, there's no ambiance, nobody cares if you're having a nice time, you're not there for the atmosphere, you're there because there's something in your brain that will hurt you if you're not.
I think that ultimately, spending money on four seconds of mild excitement over a few special monster summon scrolls that ended up being garbage, and then going straight back into the endless pointless grind, was what actually did it for me. I think there was a moment where I saw completely the whole machinery of the game, laid completely bare. I felt like I could finally see that it wasn't really a game it was like a garbage disposal that I could throw money into. It drove home what a sad little addiction I really had. The total merciless clarity that I was functionally just a type of depressed rat slamming a little lever hoping to get a good treat that would help me clear the next level of a dungeon so that I could grind a marginally better set of drop rates that would improve my clear speed on that dungeon slightly pretty much instantly burned out my dopamine receptors for that kind of gameplay.
The funny thing is, I actually can enjoy video games normally now? I buy games that look fun, I play them a normal amount, and then I put them down when I'm done, whether or not I've beaten them. I feel really weird about the way I experienced that specific type of clarity / addiction burnout, it's a very difficult feeling to describe, but I was just like "oh I hate doing this, I don't want to be this kind of animal anymore". I know for a fact that this is not something that everyone gets to do, and that in a way I'm really fortunate that I came out the other side of it a basically normal casual gamer instead of someone who would do the video game equivalent of sucking the tar out of a cigarette butt to get a nicotine fix, that's not usually how that story goes.