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Comment by ryusage | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, that only leaves 10 hours a day for the person to do anything else, and presumably 6 - 9 of that is sleeping. Optimistically, that leaves 4 hours a day to do things like eating, grooming, chores, job hunting, etc. So the extreme amount of gaming may start as a "symptom" as you say, but I just can't see how that person could really ever effect any change in their life when they spend literally almost all of their time gaming.

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You are correct as far as you go, but gaming that heavily is often caused by (and hence a symptom of) other problems, such as depression.

If you simply force the gamer to quit, the underlying problems persist, and may continue to manifest themselves in similarly harmful/unconstructive/however-you-choose-to-describe-it behaviour such as a 100-hour-a-week TV habit.

A gaming habit is frequently (usually?) a symptom rather than the root cause of the problems, although poor life decisions can exacerbate depression making it hard to disentangle the two.

14 hours being the high end certainly pushes the limits, but of the remaining 10 hours it would be possible for only 4-6 to be sleep (4 hours a night may not be great for you, but they might sleep exactly the same amount with or without gaming), an hour for eating/grooming/etc., if they live with parents they may well have few/no chores/cooking/etc.... So perhaps not for everybody, but it certainly isn't possible to play 14 hours a day and spend a few hours looking for work. Even more so if you are at the 10 hours a day rather than 14.

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