(originally written: 7/11/19, edited: 11/15/19)
Back in the 90s
When I was a kid I was fascinated by video games. Going as far back as the early 1990s. Some of my first memories come from when my Uncle showed me the classic NES games like Super Mario Bros., Metroid, Zelda, Skate Or Die, and Castlevania. Then came the brand new SNES games like Super Mario World, F-Zero, Star Fox, Super Metroid, Street Fighter, and my favorites: Turtles In Time or X-Men Mutant Apocalypse.
My youth was spent paging through the issues of Nintendo Power magazine to see the game walk-throughs, reviews, and commentary. Colorful pictures of all the characters and levels would come to fill my imagination for years. My very first neighborhood friends and I would play imaginary games outside pretending to be the different game characters on an adventure. We’d sit around and scribble drawings of them or play with their action figures. Our imaginations set ablaze with the fun of it all.

All the while my ‘Gameboy’ portable game system provided an easy distraction on all the long car trips and various times out with my parents when I was a kid. I’d be on my unending quest to catch ’em all in Pokemon or floating around in Dreamland with Kirby. Little did we all realize then that I was enjoying the kind of mindless handheld alluring engagement that’d be widely common 20+ years later via modern smartphones.

As I grew up, so did the game systems and their graphics. Soon I was playing the Nintendo 64 I won from a raffle contest our local cable TV station put on. Snowboarding down slopes in ‘1080 Snowboarding’ or ‘Snowboard Kids’. Sneaking around the halls of a forgotten temple with my friends in ‘Goldeneye 007’. We’d be flipping race cars on ‘Rush’ and ‘Rush 2’. We’d be hunting dinosaurs on ‘Turok’. Some of my fondest memories.
I’d grow up drawing the characters and scenes from games like these and theorizing game mechanics on my own, in my own imaginary games that I’d dream of being able to design and produce one day.
Online Gaming in the 2000s
Then the internet came and swept me away. Our 56k dial-up modem’s screeching as I connected into days and nights spent searching out hints, easter eggs, and cheat-codes for my favorite video games. I’d download random artwork, save it on a 3MB floppy disk, and print it out at school – the only printer I had access to back then. From there I’d painstakingly copy the artwork into my sketch book to practice drawing, and eventually get good enough to draw out my own imagined video game scenes in detail.
When we got our first ‘modern’ internet-capable computer with a graphics processor in it I got to see my first PC games: Civilization, Diablo, Quake, Doom, Rollercoaster Tycoon, and many others. From then on I became a ‘PC Gamer’ without ever having heard the term before. I’d save up my allowance and whatever cash I could find to buy more RAM – upgrading from 128mb to 256mb, and upgrading to a better graphics card from Best Buy.

After a few years, there came a new type of game. Endless in it’s scope and limitless in it’s potential. An entire world to explore non-linearly and without bound. Connected with people all over the globe. The massively multiplayer online role-playing game – “MMORPG“. Influenced by my older brother-in-law who served as one of my main role models growing up, I installed the game ‘Everquest’ on my new Emachines T18040 desktop computer sometime near the beginning of 2001.
From then on I was engrossed. Hooked. Enraptured. The graphics, although extremely polygonal and crude, were some of the first fully 3D graphics I’d ever seen. When they were set in such an epic world, controlled by real people you can group up and adventure with in real time… it blew my little 13 year old mind.

The game was mostly played in the first-person view. It gave the experience a very immersive feeling – unlike anything I’d played at that point. The world was open, free to roam and explore. Unlike nearly every other game were you can only progress linearly from one place to the next in a predefined sequence of stages – Everquest let you go anywhere you wanted to go within the world. And that world was huge.
You could create your own character, choose how it looked, give it a custom name, and go on the adventure building the character to be stronger and better over time. It was the first game I’d seen that was online, so you played the game along-side thousands of other people. Exploring the same huge game world with their own characters. You could chat with them, group up with them to accomplish difficult challenges, and as time went on you could forge some great friendships with these people. It was totally amazing.

Back then, online gaming and it’s culture were far from mainstream. Very different than they are now, where online gaming has become a normal pass time for the average person. Everquest was the first of it’s kind, at the cutting edge of game technology, mostly known only within the most dedicated gamer circles. The typical MMO player was a closeted, nerdy, vaguely middle-aged, slightly agoraphobic enthusiast. Things were very different than they are now. As the wild, outdoorsy, active, skateboarder, and budding bass guitarist in a garage band… I was very different than most of the other players I encountered in the game.
Up until then, I’d only casually played video games. I spent most of my time learning how to skateboard outside with my friends. I’d go on bike rides all day through the desert in my area. I’d been more-or-less against this new internet thing as it was becoming a major pillar in our society. I’d make fun of the internet kids in chatrooms and the ‘nerds’ who didn’t know or couldn’t find the importance of spending most of their time outside in the sun climbing trees and being a physically hyper-energetic spaz like I was.
Though, once I started playing Everquest that began to change. The extremely limited self-control of my little 13-year-old brain never stood a chance. As high school got my difficult, both academically and socially, I resolved to buck it all and play Everquest more and more. Spending less and less time out in my life developing myself. Online gaming soon consumed my life and many opportunities, potentialities, and relationships I could have had growing up… all before I turned 18.
My high school years came and went, all the while I lived a double life.
In one life I was a teenaged skateboarding musician that never got good grades. Anti-establishment, rebellious, and consumed with your typical punk rock rhetoric. I ditched classes often to either play with the garage band I was in or hang out with my girlfriend. I was certainly pretty good at what I concentrated on. I was known for my skate tricks and my ability to jam out on my electric bass guitar. Yet I never really found any true success in those things. Ask anyone that knew me at the time and they might say I was a great skater or bassist, but they knew that I could do a lot better. I just didn’t connect the dots enough to understand how. Where it actually mattered, in my school work, I rarely ever excelled. I had a small circle of friends from my hobbies but I was never that popular. By 2004 in my last year of high school my grades were bad enough that I had to finish in a charter home school. That gave me the schedule to be able to pick up my first full-time job, and that was that. Childhood over.


In my other life I was glued to the computer playing Everquest, the newly released World of Warcraft, or some other equally engrossing game. I would play every day, for many many hours per day. After so many years, I’d gotten really close to my virtual ‘friends’ I met in these games as we took on harder and harder challenges together. Gathering as many as 80 people online to coordinate taking on the hardest tasks – raids. After investing thousands of hours in the characters I played, they’d become good enough, with enough rare in-game items that they actually held real world value. At the time there were auction sites where you could sell your character or in-game currency for hundreds, if not thousands, of real-world dollars. I’d advanced into the category of the ‘End Game’ or ‘Hardcore’ gaming, where only the dedicated and experienced could make the cut. Although it felt like I had progressed so much and achieved so many things… the other side of my life knew, in reality, what a joke it all was.

As the years went on, through the end of the 2000s I had a really difficult time adapting to the constraints and expectations of a young adult. I knew my addiction to gaming held me back, so I would do what I could to either play less or quit playing all together. My life would get better for a time and I would make progress in my career or college. Though eventually I would have troubles, like being laid off from a job, dealing with a break-up, or being confronted with some other totally normal upsetting life event. To cope with my troubles I would go right back into gaming and sulking my temperament in the fantasy worlds that I’d come to recognize as the perfect distraction.
Friendships would come and go throughout those years. No one likes being flaked on or stood up when you make plans with them. No one likes having a boyfriend or significant other that’s only half-there most of the time. Family isn’t very close when you only hear from them once in a blue moon, or only see them on holidays. Due to my gaming addiction and the fantasy world distractions it provided, I would be that guy more often than not. I was terrible at nurturing the support structures that would have normally helped me through hard times. In so many cases I was on my own, and for good reason. I was a rather selfish, unreliable, impulsive person.
Getting Better in the 2010s
After ending 2009 with a full year of hardcore gaming almost 24/7, I started to play less and less. Throughout the 2010s I got better about all this but I would still struggle occasionally. I would go for a year or two without gaming and make good progress in my life. Progress toward my career, employment, friendships, family, hobbies, and growing as a person. My skateboarding began to flourish and I started filming video clips. I moved out of my parents house, and all at once one day it struck me. I decided I would become a computer programmer in 2012. That began replacing all my motivations for gaming with much more productive learning and work. Yet still, I would have a span of months or a year, here or there, where I’d devolve into online gaming with all my free-time when life wasn’t working out how I’d hoped it would.
The 2010s brought me a short-lived marriage to a full-time gamer, moving thousands of miles away to explore a new life with her. It brought me new successes and progress in skateboarding, new friends and acquaintances, and new passions. They brought me run-ins with famous people I’d only read about or seen online. They gave me life-altering experiences that brought me from the highest highs to the lowest rock bottoms… all completely changing how I look at life. Truly, I could write an even longer article about each and every step of the way, describing how stupid I was and how much more mature of a person I’ve become because of all of it. All that will have to wait for another day. It’s just important to note that the 2010s was an absolute roller-coaster ride.
Now I’m here in 2019. At the end of a decade.
After going back and forth, trying to quit gaming over and over for almost 20 years, I’m here to share some thoughts and perspectives on the topic of gaming addiction. For all the people that have struggled like I have or are continuing to struggle today with an addiction to video games, I’m sharing my story because I have something to say about it all.
Picking Up Old Bad Habits
Last year, throughout the first half of 2019, my life had been better than it’d ever been. I got an amazing job in December 2018, the first job I’d ever had that paid above the poverty line. With that, I’d been able to pay off most of the debt I’d accumulated over the last decade of going from one minimum wage dead-end job to the next. I had more liquid money in my bank account than ever before. It felt good. Along with that amazing job, I restarted college classes and I was getting A’s in every course for the first time in my life. My grade point average was getting back up to an acceptable level after suffering for so long. I had my sights set at transferring to an online university to complete my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, something I never thought possible in years past. I was in a nurturing (yet somewhat chaotic) relationship. I had a safe place to sleep and as much food as I could eat. Things were as fantastic as they could realistically be.
So then, why did I fall back into a video game addiction that’d plagued my life for years? What have I done with myself to break away from that habit since then so that I can keep progressing in life? Let me explain.
Counting The Hours
This was my most recent character’s profile in World of Warcraft:
https://raider.io/characters/us/area-52/Moosade#season=season-bfa-2
According to that profile link, during World of Warcraft’s ‘Season 2’ which stretched between February to June 2019 (roughly 5 months) I completed 123 advanced group challenges, which usually take about an hour. To complete these groups you gather 4 of the best players you can find in the game and attempt to finish a series of difficult fights in under a certain amount of time, clearing out and conquering the dungeon. That’s not to mention my 37 failed attempts where we took too long to complete the dungeon, along with an untold amount of total failures where everyone simply left the group part-way through, abandoning the mission to try again later.

To the uninitiated, that all represents a lot of hours I spent in the game.
Having spent a raw total of 700 hours actively logged into the game, over the 5 months of ‘Season 2’…
That’s an average of 33 hours per week that I played World of Warcraft.
Of course, that doesn’t include the time I spent chatting with friends in Discord about the game, watching strategy videos about the game, and it doesn’t account for the other games I was playing during that time.
That’s an entire part time job worth of time.
During that span of time I got to be ranked #260,836 out of 2,715,116 players in the world. That’s just above the top 10% of all World of Warcraft players. But what does that even mean? They don’t hand out trophies for that. I don’t think I achieved anything aside from wasted time. Thrown away into enjoying this strange form of empty fun.
I say it’s empty because there are so many other more beneficial ways to have spent that time. In 700 hours I could have learned a new programming language to further my career. I could have developed a new business website and sold it for thousands of dollars. I could have written thousands of words toward a book or some set of articles I could publish. I could have learned the basics and begun to master virtually any real productive, admirable, and interesting skill.
I could have made real things, in real life, to give or sell to real people and affect the world in real ways. Instead, I was disappearing into a virtual world, doing virtual things, talking to strangers I’d probably never see again, with so little to show for it that it’s laughable.
That’s a entire month thrown away.
Time spent gaming is still very empty, even if you consider yourself a ‘productive‘ type of person. People always try to defend their gaming addiction by pointing out other pass times and comparing it to them. It’s easy to get caught up in that kind of thinking…. like, “Hey man, gaming is my hobby… just like any other fun hobbies like going out with friends, going hiking, playing music, playing sports, etc.”
Yet, it’s really not the same. The environment is different, the people are different, the entire activity is different. Doing things in the real world has so much more substance. Even when you’re doing the most mundane ‘boring’ things. It activates your mind and your body in so many beneficial ways. The sights, the sounds, the smells, the physical motion and contact. It all combines to build real memories through every layer of your mind – conscious and subconscious.
That may not mean all that much to you. Especially if you consider it one day at a time. So you skipped out on going to that one place with those friends that one time. So what? You’ve been to that place before, you’ll be able to see those friends again, and you’ll have the opportunity to do it some other time. Right?
Yeah maybe… but if you could skip out on 10.. 20… 30 hours a week. What’s stopping you from doing that every week? What’s stopping you from doing that every month? Every year? 32 hours per a week adds up to 1664 hours in the year. That’s over 1000 hours that those friends, those places, and the rest of the world will be out there changing without you.
Counting The Days
With this new perspective on what I could have been doing with my time spent gaming, I started really looking back at previous years. If the time spent in 2019 gaming added up to be so much, 700 hours, over only 5 months – I dreaded looking closer at the time I spent gaming over the last couple decades. But if I was going to quit ‘for good’ this time, I knew that seeing it all would help me see more of the full impact it’s had on my life.
A lot of games nowadays have some way to see how many hours you’ve spent playing it overall. Like World of Warcraft and Everquest both have a ‘/played’ command. This command gives you a message that tells you how much time you’ve spent on that character.
For example, one of my characters in World of Warcraft has… 49 days, 8 hours, 42 mins, 10 secs

Let’s stop and think about that. There’s 24 hours in each day. Busting some quick maths…
49 days multiplied by 24 hours… that’s 1176 hours.
Ok.. that’s a lot of time, but it gets much worse. I played many other characters in World of Warcraft… at least 15 of them.

Even worse, I played many many more characters in Everquest for a much longer time.
Here’s an example of one of my Everquest characters…

That’s 161 days, multiplied by 24 hours… 3864 hours.
Between one character in World of Warcraft and one character in Everquest, I spent 5055 hours playing video games.
Once I saw that I had to keep digging. I wanted to see how much total time I spent playing these two games in my life. Well, it took a little while to check all of them, but…


That’s 10,550 hours in Everquest and 8,750 hours in World of Warcraft.
Those aren’t the only games I played either. Not all games will tell you how much you’ve played them.
I know I also played Battlefield 4 a lot recently. In that game I wracked up 740 hours…

PUBG is another game I played recently… there I have 114 hours…

Other games I tried for a while but eventually put down. I played those no more than 20 or 30 hours total. Some examples: EverQuest2, Guild Wars, The Matrix Online, Rift, Final Fantasy 14, Aion, TERA, Vanguard, Elder Scrolls Online, Secret World, and a few more.
Since I really don’t want to dig up all those old game accounts to see if I can find a ‘played’ time… let’s just say I played each of them for 10 hours on average. Some more, some less. That’s still another 100+ hours.
10550+8750+740+114+100 = 20254 hours
That’s the equivalent of a solid 844 days of time, wasted.
So what does that mean? It’s hard to practically relate to such a huge solid block of time. Well let’s consider it like this.
Each day is 24 hours. Let’s imagine that you don’t have a job and no other responsibilities. You have to eat for about 3 hours total per day and take care of yourself for 2 hours total per day. Let’s say you have a perfect sleep schedule of 8 hours per day.
That leaves 11 hours in a day that you would be free to do anything you want. If we divide that 20254 hours into 11 hour days… that’s 1841 days…
…or 5 YEARS.
Five Years
Five years. That’s how long it takes for a newborn baby grow up to learn how to do everything they need to start Kindergarten – walk, talk, draw pictures, know their address and phone number, and dress themselves – including zipping up a jacket and tying their shoes.
That’s how long it takes to complete a college degree and land your first decent paying job (depending on your major).
In the Software Engineering field that’s how long it can take to go from earning $40k/year as a junior-level engineer all the way up to earning over $100k/year as a senior-level engineer… if you make a lot of good decisions.
Counting Makes It Real
I hope you can see how trying to count out exactly how much of your time you spend playing video games can really help put things into perspective. It can give you a meaningful tool that you can make observations with. In 18,000 hours of time I could have done so many things. I could have gone so many places, met so many new people, tried so many new things, progressed my skills and interests so much further.
In 20,000 hours, I could have tried out a bunch of different side hustles and ways to make extra money. Even if only half of that time was successfully spent on profitable efforts – that’s still 10000 hours. Even if I only averaged $12 per hour, that’s still $120,000!
All the same, it’s easy to write all that off with believing that you’d waste it some other way. You might think you wouldn’t be more productive or more adventurous or more social if you didn’t game. Well having spent it on gaming, I’ve put in 18,000 hours toward learning or reinforcing bad habits. Not calling people back, giving in to the urge of flaking out on plans, staying home and getting comfortable in a dull life. Letting my brain rot away.
The Realization Of What I Was Missing
With all this in mind I should never stop to wonder why I didn’t do well in high school. Why I never made it through college in a reasonable amount of time. Not often working for very much pay. Not having much of a social life or consistent friendships. Going through 15 unsuccessful serious relationships of various durations. My life’s been spent with one eye on a video game. Ready to escape, under the guise of a fun hobby.
I never did cocaine, never smoked meth, never shot-up heroin. I rarely drank alcohol and I haven’t ever gambled. Of all the bad habits and addictions I could have let into my life, gaming is one of the cheapest and arguably least destructive. It’s with that exact rationalization that I could justify continuing on for years and years. Wasting my life.
It’s like the harmless candy we eat and the soda we drink. Oily, calorie-packed, carbohydrate laced food topped with cheese and salted into oblivion isn’t a problem until you start eating it every single day, and those days go on and on without end. These snacks and foods aren’t that immediately unhealthy. What’s the harm? What’s the big deal? None of the horrific effects of bad food will hit you right away. You won’t get cancer, develop high blood pressure, rot out your teeth, spike up your insulin levels out of control into diabetes, or have a massive heart attack. If anything the delicious tastes and happiness you get from eating yummy unhealthy food will make you want to eat more and more. It feels like a really good idea.
The same goes for most other bad habits. Start drinking alcohol socially and your bound to have some good times when you go out. Start smoking weed and everything will be more enjoyable, it’ll be easier to relax about everything that’s stressing you out and you might end up being more creative. Start smoking cigarettes or vaping and the effects of nicotine will keep you focused and diligent on what you want to do for longer than normal.
At first, virtually every bad habit that you could pick up has quite a nice up-side. Those negative effects won’t start coming on for months or years. That’s why it can be extremely easy to just ignore them. The same goes for gaming too much. I started off innocently killing demons in the catacombs of a cursed church every now and then. Yet over just a few months, maybe a year or two, I got to where I would rather stay locked in my room playing video games than do just about anything else.
There’s also something more devious about these bad habits that I think we’re just recently starting to come to realize. For instance, sugar throws the reward-center in your brain out of whack, it messes with your memory, your mood, your ability to think. It’s so much worse than most people know. So it makes me wonder how much better off you would be if you just never ate any sugary foods. You’d never have those hidden negative effects lurking in the background messing with your mind. You’d probably be more stable, able to control your emotions more easily. You’d probably have gotten frustrated less often, maybe had fewer arguments with people. Honestly you may have ended up having a very different life. That’s all pretty hard to do nowadays though, sugar is in everything. But I’m sure you see where I’m going with this.
The act of excessively playing video games has a whole host of negative effects on your social emotional health. So what if you just never got into gaming? How much different would your life have been? That’s what I wondered about my life quite a bit. As I detailed earlier… I would have definitely had a lot more time available to do good things with, but I may have also had a more clear and happy mind as well. Fewer eras of depression, fewer difficulties getting along with people socially, a better chance to think and feel about the world with fewer difficulties and confusions.
Regardless of how much time I spent on gaming, regardless of how bad gaming was for my brain and my emotions, there’s an obvious truth. By gaming as much as I did I wasn’t reaching for any level of excellence in my life. I was just barely keeping up with my short term responsibilities. I might have thought that this isn’t that bad, because I’m still keeping up with what I absolutely have to do. The thing is, I wasn’t giving myself the chance to ever advance to a better life altogether. By not giving myself the time, or the mental acuity, to put extra effort into my life and starting to stick to long-term goals I was trading the opportunity to get ahead in life for easy instant entertainment and relaxation.
Nothing Is Guaranteed In Life
Thinking back to my most recent gaming habits in 2019, playing for 3 hours per day didn’t sound like very much. To defend it I might look to more hardcore gamers, like I used to be years ago, that spend 12+ hours per day gaming. That makes my little 3 hour habit look innocent by comparison. That was my own rationalization each day, “Hey man, I’m not playing all day… I’ve got a great job, I’m doing the best I’ve ever done, it’s not that big of a deal!”
Thinking about spending those 3 hours on something else doesn’t really demonstrate anything terribly useful at first glance, either. You can only do so much work or studying in 3 hours. The immediate results aren’t very amazing at all. You could also spend 3 hours hanging out with friends or family and think the same. It might provide a good memory, but such a small increment of time doesn’t feel very consequential.
The truth is that the really life-changing accomplishments, friendships, and relationships that vastly improve your circumstances or deeply enrich your life come in the form of consistent repetition. Many, many small study/work sessions and very small gradual, almost invisible, improvements. Many, many little hang out sessions and little experiences that grow trust and your bonds with people. Building up over time, investing more and more of yourself over a long period.
You hang out with your friends for 3 hours a day, a few times a week, and over the course of years you become best friends. You dive into learning about an academic subject for 3 hours a day, a few times a week, and – yeah – you get it – over the course of years you become an extremely knowledgeable professional in that subject.
It’s so funny that this isn’t obvious to a video game player most of the time. We have something that shows us this built into most video games. Have you ever leveled up in a video game? Have you ever gained ‘Experience Points’? Do you have a bar meter in your favorite game that grows as you complete tasks? What about a score, that you continue to work toward growing? Most games have point systems like this. They promise us that if we keep spending time playing the game, we’ll eventually fill that bar and get to the next stage in the game. We can keep checking the points every day as we work toward beating the game.
It’s not so obvious for all the other areas of our lives. Life is much less predictable and we don’t have any visible overall “Life Score” that promises to increase steadily as we invest effort into ourselves and our relationships. Given the uncertain nature of reality, that “Life Score” might always be at risk to decrease or back-slide during hard times. You might think to use the total amount of money in your bank account to serve as a “Life Score” but it just takes a one major crisis in your life, or in the economy, to decimate your bank account. You might think to use your possessions, your education, your number of friends, your places travelled, your happy memories, the heaviest weight you lifted at the gym, or some combination of all of it. But it’s all opaque, vague, and subjective. What do you use to compare all that stuff to? How would you know that your “Life Score” is good or bad?
It’s this vagueness, this risk of failure, and the uncertain nature of how life works that keeps a lot of people from trusting in long-term thinking. Maybe you tried working on a long-term plan at some point, but for whatever reason it just never worked out. Things come up – Life Happens™️. So this can totally ruin your long-term outlook. After all, the short-term is where the fun is. The short-term is much easier. In the short-term style of planning, thinking and living you’re guaranteed for most things to work out. Yet, all the best stuff in life, all the greatest accomplishments and all the most fulfilling relationships… they only really happen over the long-term.
The main problem I see with video games is that the long-term planning in them is almost guaranteed to work out. You’re in a world designed and built to assure your success in the long-term. The game designers made it so that if you start playing the game, follow the gameplay, complete all the levels, and beat all the bosses – you are 100% guaranteed to win.
In the ‘Role Playing’ games I used to play, when you perform an action you had a chance at increasing your skill related to that action. As attack enemies with a sword, you eventually increase your skill level with using swords. If you cast magic spells, you increase your Conflagration and Conjuration skills. It’s clear and guaranteed. Each step of the way, you get incremental ‘rewards’ in seeing your skill level number go up. Then you keep doing the thing and you progress through the game. If it didn’t work that way you would think the game was broken and you’d contact customer support or something. No one wants to play a game that isn’t built to win.
Yet in life, just because you practice and practice, day after day, week after week, month after month… there isn’t any clearly defined number system that ‘rewards’ you in obvious ways as you do it. There is no easy way to measure your skill, it’s all subjective and it’s all based what’s actually needed to do that skill. There is no guarantee that you will ever reach a higher skill. You might be practicing the wrong thing, reading the wrong books, listening to the wrong people, or you’re lacking a more fundamental ability that no one ever told you about. I’m talking about skills like sewing or guitar playing, painting or sculpting, writing or speaking, and all the countless other things you can grow an ability in. I’m talking about social skills and networking, friendships and romantic relationships. I’m talking about studying academic subjects or building an insight into professional business topics. No where ever has anyone honestly been able to say that you’re guaranteed for success in any of this.
Consider this for anything in life. For example, if you practice guitar for 3 hours per night, for 7 days a week, for 4 weeks a month, for 12 months a year, for multiple years at a time – there is no guarantee that you will be a successful musician. It takes more than just strumming some chords, and taking some lessons. Your opinion on yourself is usually obscured, so you won’t objectively know if you’re getting any better until you get feedback from other people listening to you play. Even then, those people might want to be supportive and tell you that you’re better than you actually are. They might actually not like you so they’ll say you’re worse than you actually are. There are thousands of people out there that might tell you exactly what you need to do for success – but which ones do you listen to? At least some of their advice won’t work for your situation.
It’s much, much, much more complicated than when you’re playing a video game. In the game you just pick up the guitar, press the button, and your character’s skill in guitar playing goes up. You can see it. It’s a number. The number goes up, you can see that you’re achieving something. It’s a little easy ‘reward’ that stacks up as you just play the game and have fun.
Fooled By False Rewards
It’s the concept of these ‘rewards’ and ‘achievements’ that we get in video games that can keep us coming back for more. It’s my opinion that a huge part of becoming addicted to a video game is getting tricked into thinking you’re really accomplishing something tangible. You put in the effort by playing the game, then you receive immediate feedback for those efforts. It’s satisfying. You feel like you’re succeeding. Even if it’s something very small. In this really small way, it feels like you’ve won. The more challenging the game, the sweeter the feelings, the better the rewards. But how challenging are they really?

Many games feel incredibly challenging, forcing you to creatively strategize fast solutions, actively engaging you in cognitive problem solving tasks, and pushing you to improve your instant reaction or fine motor skills. It feels rewarding to ‘achieve’ something difficult in a game that’s known to be a difficult game, or win against another player online in a competitive scenario.
But I’ve never seen a game, in my 28+ years of gaming, that truly challenges you enough to improve that ability in the real-life activity it’s modelled after. Just because you’ve played 30,000 hours of Call of Duty or another first person shooter game… you’re not going to be a very good special ops solider in a real war. Never once. It’s impossible. They may increase your self-confidence in problem solving. They may boost your persistence with making countless attempts toward something. They may build your cognitive reaction time. But the truth is, you’re sitting on a chair or a couch, holding a controller or a mouse, staring at a screen. That’s it.
It almost goes without saying, but if you pitted a lifetime gamer against someone who spent all their time actually learning the same activity that the gamer has been simulating… I’m willing to bet the gamer wouldn’t even stand a chance. Consider the best Call of Duty player in a real-life gun duel with a career weapons expert, the greatest Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater gamer against an actual professional skateboarder, etc. Now that I’m thinking of it, that’d probably make a hilarious TV show.
The thing is, by spending so much time playing these simulated challenges… you’re wiring your brain to expect a predictable level of fairness that just doesn’t exist in the real world. Games are fair. You play the game the right way, you complete the levels, you expect to win. You aim your gun at an enemy in a game, you click the mouse… that enemy is going to take damage. You level up your character and fight the boss, you dodge his attacks and land all your attacks – you are going to beat that boss. You do these kinds of things in games so often, every day for years at a time, and it becomes the basis of how you think all things should happen.
Real life isn’t fair this way. In a real-life scenario you could do everything right, complete all the tasks, do everything required… and still might lose. The real world is so complex, with so many different things related to anything you are trying to do… it’s impossible to predict with 100% assurance that you have it all figured out. Just because you start a business after spending years in business school doesn’t mean that business is going to be a success. Just because you spend years and years getting to know someone and build a friendship with them doesn’t mean they won’t suddenly backstab you. Life wasn’t designed for you to win by some ‘life designer’. This real life game is rigged and you can’t get your money back.
You Can’t Win
These online games I played for so many years are made so that you succeed. No one wants to play a game where you’re destined for failure no matter how hard you try. Sure, they’re still difficult. You may need to spend many hours and put in countless attempts to gain success in these games. It may feel like work. However, it’s all constructed in a virtual world where the main goal is to hold your attention and your interest. Give you rewards a little bit at a time to keep you playing. Inch you toward a clearly defined finish line. Play more and you’ll eventually get there. You’ll eventually win. I mean, you have to be able to. You bought the game or you’re paying the game subscription for it. You’re the customer, and the customer wins.
So you do that. You play and play and play… you eventually win. Then you feel good. Look what you just did – that’s awesome. Good job. You spend hours working toward anything and finally accomplishing it, you’re going to feel good for a time. Then you keep playing, maybe it’s another game… maybe it’s the same game on a higher difficulty setting. And the cycle repeats.
The more you do this, the more you experience the proof that your time spent in the game results in an accomplishment you feel good about. Eventually, your brain gets rewired to stop really knowing the difference between accomplishing something in a game and accomplishing something in real-life. If anything, you’d prefer to play games because you know for sure that you’re going to win and get that good feeling at the end of it. The problem is it never progresses your life forward. It doesn’t bring you any more prosperity or progress in your life than if you’d just sat there in your room counting the dimples on the wall. When you’re playing a game, you’re staring at a screen – that’s all. It glows and the lights feel good on your brain. Beyond that, all meaning and purpose is negligible.
In this life, we are not set up for success the same way as we are in video games. We have every temptation, pitfall, mistake, and bad luck situation swirling around us overhead at all times. Just waiting for the chance to swoop down and enact a painful series of unfortunate events that will run their course – outside of our control and in spite of all our best intentions. Life is not easy. It’s not a game and it’s not built to be fair. It doesn’t always make sense, the people in it aren’t always rational, and our society isn’t a safe place.
If “Life” was a game that you bought from GameStop or downloaded from Steam you’d pretty quickly give it a really bad review – thumbs down. “The graphics are really good, but it’s broken! The tutorial gives you false information, stuff happens randomly that doesn’t make sense, and no matter how hard I try it doesn’t seem like I’m leveling up. TWO THUMBS DOWN!”
This is not a game, no matter how hard you try to play it like one. You can’t win.
But wait – aren’t there really successful people out there? Millionaires? Billionaires? Aren’t they winning? What about famous people with millions of adoring fans? Aren’t they winning? What about the people with loving families and everything they need to be happy? Aren’t they winning? WHAT ABOUT JESUS, OR MUHAMMAD, OR ISSAC NEWTON, OR JOHN D ROCKAFELLER… DIDN’T THEY WIN?!
Alright calm down. I understand that you may see many successful, influential, spiritually enlightened, or loved by their families. You may think they have ‘won’ at life. Sorry. You’re wrong. All those people made great progress, but they did not win. Let me explain.
Winning is subjective. In life, you’ll have to decide what “winning” means to you, personally. Even if you reach that goal, the goal post will move. You may have won this stage in life. You may have won this pursuit or in that topic, but the next level is coming and you will only see a new mountain to climb. In life you can only make progress. The better you are, then so too is the better you can become. The better you become, the worse you are in other areas. You will never know all the areas, you will never have time to become the best at all of them.

Life is a whack-a-mole game with an infinite amount of moles and they all are both appearing and disappearing at the same time randomly, everywhere and no where. All the moles have the capability of hurting your feelings and injuring you. None of the moles look the same, or are even guaranteed to come out of the holes… maybe one is over on the wall over there… one might be floating in the air randomly outside. Who knows!?
What Could Have Been
In the time I spent playing video games, as easy to justify it as it may have been, as potentially useful as I might be able to spin it or defend it; It was just a waste of valuable time that I will never get back. No amount of rationalization can overcome that hard truth.
I played online games for an accumulated four and a half years. I probably spent even more time playing other types of games all through my childhood. In that amount of time, I could have focused intently all throughout grade school and got straight A’s. Then on to high school, then college. I was a ‘gifted’ kid. Always scored above 95% in all standardized tests. Always tested at an above average ‘IQ’ score. So by the time I was 20 I might have gotten my Bachelor’s degree. I might have known exactly what I wanted to do for a career. For the last 10+ years since then I could have been working regularly in highly paid jobs. I could have been doing more interesting and challenging things that actually brought an outsized value to society.
By going that route I could have been saving between $500 to $1000 per month easily. Heck I could have been saving upwards of $2000 per month if things were really going that well. In this way I could have built up a savings of between $60000… and $240000! I’d have put that into the stock market and if I gained a modest 6% earnings with that investment – I might have over $300,000 saved by now. Beyond that I could have bought a house when interest was low and prices were very cheap. For instance, I could have bought the house I currently own for $150,000 less. I could have used that extra money to invest in more properties back when real estate was more profitable to get into. Those investments could have grown to provide sources of ‘passive’ income in the form of rentals or resale. That’s all money that I could have used to travel many places, treat my extended family to a better life, or start my own family and have kids.
I would have had the free time, some 32 hours per week over the course of over 10 years to consistently keep up social contacts. Friends, family, acquaintances, business partners, and lovers to have made real lasting and meaningful memories with people. Memories whose insights, good and bad, might have driven me to be a better person more generally. Practice toward habits that contribute to a longer, happier, healthier, and more fulfilling life.
If only life was so idyllic.
What Has Been Instead
Instead, I spent my high school years ditching class, rebelling, and encountering countless frustrations at the expectations all the adults in my life had for me. I embraced heavy extreme music and skateboarding. I spent all the time I wasn’t gaming toward learning to play music that most people don’t like. Hanging out with the bands I was in. Popping around on my skateboard hurting myself. Going to local shows/concerts, and throwing myself around at the skatepark. I lived the same kind of escapism in my real life that my virtual life reinforced. As the years went by, everything in my life crumbled due to my avoidance. Avoidance of responsibility and discipline. I just wanted to have fun. I quit anything when it got to be too difficult or there were no obvious solutions to my problems.
Well into my twenties I had issues meeting the challenges of adult life. Working with or interacting with people to solve issues, and having patience with the flow of life were incredibly difficult to me. Halfway through my twenties I started to push myself to be better and do greater things, but still, I’d inevitably relapse or fall back while I learned to live through life’s lessons.

Life On The Losing Team
So I sit now, in my 30’s looking at a less-than-idyllic world. Panicked at the thought of a life spent wasted, absent, and avoided. Escape brought me questing for a deeper hole of virtual relief for so long that the world caught up with me and we’re all now scrolling on our smartphones endlessly searching the internet for time wasted in temporary entertainment. A generation of people who flake on social plans more readily, binge on Netflix more fervently, and shutter in a terrified stupor over picking up a call and using our voices to speak a conversation. Our interactions are text-based messages of 3 or 4 syllables, only traded enough to meet the minimum requirements for meaning; no nuance or flavor, insight or feeling. Only short abbreviations and single frame memes lined with slang words and terms to turn the phrase enough to chuckle to ourselves as we go about our lives drenched in a veil of uncertainty about everything around us.
For people like me that threw our younger years away to bad habits and procrastination, life is complex and it’s difficult to keep our heads above water. On the whole, our minds are wrapped in depressive, anxious morbidity and dark humor to distract us from its irony. Our attention deficiencies and hyperactive tendencies only move us enough to show us what we lack or can’t have. What we aren’t. What we can’t easily be. The mental disorders listed as most prevalent among my generation hold us back and typify us. They put us in a box, and they put pills in our bottles. They limit us to feel like we can’t achieve anything better than the minimum viable possibilities in our lives. Minimum wages and self-destructive habits are the invisible prison walls of someone so convinced they’ve got some kind of a Major Depressive, Post Traumatic, Anxiety, Borderline, Dissociative Disorder that they’ll never be the impressive successful type of person that they and everyone that’s loved them always hoped they’d be. They’ll never be a millionaire, hell they may never make enough money to move out of their parent’s house. They’ll never ever be a stable person with normalized moods and the ability to focus on a topic for long enough to learn something new.
This all hyperbolic… but this what it can feel like. It seems like the new average life in the circles I grew up in and the people that share their feelings with me. This is what many of us face in our own second guessings.
So when life feels impossible because we’re too poor, misguided, mentally unable, and stunted; video games and other escapist behaviors feel like the only rational path to walk for many. Our college degrees cost so much and the outlook of our jobs pay so little. The nightly news brings us fear and the daytime talk shows numb our senses. There are dangerous chemicals in everything, the economy is constantly in unpredictable flux and everything is more expensive than it ever was. A house to cover our family with and food to keep them from starving can take multiple jobs from multiple earners and we still might need some public assistance.
I’m here to tell you loud and clear that it doesn’t have to be this way. At the core of everything you’re troubled with and everything holding you back, keeping you addicted, keeping you from pursuing the life you want, is a fuel. At the center of it all is a fuel that’s ready to burn and ignite your passion toward something greater. Light that match, start that burn, and guard the flame with everything you have.
My continued bout against gaming addiction, a silly fight when compared to other addictions, has still brought me to realize that we all face drastic uphill battles. Each of us has our own flavor and mix of the assortment. The sooner we find them and begin to resist them, the sooner we can start to try where we weren’t able to try before.
If we don’t spend all our time forcing ourselves to try, then at the end of our lives we’ll only have an endless list of things we’d wished we’d been able to do and dreams we left unfulfilled. We’ll have an endless list of reasons why we couldn’t… instead of the one piece of wisdom about how we could.
If life isn’t structured in a way that promises success, I feel like we need to rewrite the definitions for ‘Life’, ‘Success’, and ‘Promise’ for ourselves. Then better refine those definitions with each passing day. For me, it’s the only hope I have because this is the only life I have.
This is the last November 19th, 2020 that I’ll ever have.
You and I are no different in one important way. This is the only life you have. There are no re-tries, re-dos, re-sets, or second chances. What’s done is in the past and that time can’t be given back. You can only try harder tomorrow. So it’s with that earlier thought of an idyllic life with which I frame my outlook now.
How can I catch up to the life I would have if I never slacked off?
How can I start picking up the good habits I need?
How can I regain the fulfilling life experiences that I’ve been missing out on?
I’ll try and see. You do the same. We’ll meet up later and share how it went.
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