Guilt.
After school me and my friends would run back home and play video games. It was like a race to see who could show up on the call fist. Some would eat their afternoon during call. I remember that because I would take the bus and therefore got home half-an-hour later, I would get upset at the fact they were already mid-game and didn’t wait for me.
As much as I enjoyed those times I spent with those friends — playing together, laughing, poking fun, raging, kicking someone from the call for no reason — each afternoon was always followed by a hollowing sense of guilt and anxiety. I felt like we were escaping from reality (and we were). Every once in a while there was that awkward peace-disrupting moment when someone shouted with their parents and forgot to mute.
Of course video games don’t feel the same, we grew up! It’s not that the “developers are bad” or “game companies are greedy,” like it or not, you and I have responsibilities and duties to take care of! — I repeat, like it or not! We have a whole life ahead of us: a career to build from the ground up and future children that NEED YOU to be responsible right NOW. Imagine your children ask you what you did when you were their age and you don’t have anything cool to say, the special moments that would have been stories were instead all in a game. Why wouldn’t you feel guilty!
Where are those friends now? Wasting away in worthless degrees, soon to be wasting away in worthless jobs. Where am I? This close to throwing away my amazing degree, my lucky golden ticket because I’m too awkward to make friends. I’m left in shame, I don’t know what role I played in this outcome. Was it foolish for me to expect that they would grow up?
On one hand, we didn’t how big a mistake we were committing. On the other hand, we felt we were doing something wrong. Can we think ourselves shameless and run away from the guilt? Maybe you, but not me. I can not stand to pretend any longer. I am NOT shameless, not anymore.
Self-hatred.
You think you are a sinner, but you are really looking for a fire that ignites you.
It is a waste of time and we know it. You can get the same feeling of accomplishment and brotherhood that you get from games by playing sports. Competitive video games are literally sports with added progression and complexity but without the physical exhaustion. In real life, you could throw a ball around with your friends only for so long until you all got tired and went home to actually do some chores or study or something. But in the virtual world you don’t even have to leave your chair, you can waste an entire DAY and even hours of sleep with your friends until eventually you cant open your eyes and go to bed. This is the problem, there is nothing stopping you from sinking deeper and deeper and deeper into the black-hole of dependence. To make matters worse, the built in progression systems makes you feel like you sort of did something.
Girls like three things in men above all else: social ability, athleticism and confidence. Sports give you all of these whilst games DETRACT from them. This is why even if you are a good guy with a decent future, being nerdy will make girls avoid you romantically (friend-zone you); the problem is that they don’t even really see you as a man.
Games are childish. Sports are cool. Even if your footballer friends look like stick-figures, at least they’re athletic. Getting sun, being around other young men, sweating, competing, trying; all of these serve to increase their testosterone and make them more confident than you. And then the gamers have testosterone so low that they are literally developing man boobs (gynocomastia) and storing more fat in their bellies and faces rather than evenly across their bodies — the result: a chubby look with skinny arms.
Games will also make you ‘autistic.’ You are not autistic, rather being part of niche internet communities has made you out of touch. Both being inside and having a worse appearance will come together to destroy you in social situations. With these factors combined, the average nerd doesn’t stand a chance.
“But I go to the gym or do sports.”
That’s great, it will fix your self-esteem, confidence and looks — by all means, keep going — but know your so-called ‘autism’ won’t fix itself unless you completely sever your attachment with these internet communities and minimally integrate yourself into “normie” culture.
There are two groups of copers in life: “outsider” copers and “normie” copers. One plays video games every day, the other drinks every week and has casual sex. Granted, there are gonna be some people in the intersection. Still, both are losers escaping reality and only causing problems for their future selves, but one of these losers has real relationships and a level of intimacy in his life. All of this to say, I would rather you drink and party than play video games; that’s how much they stagger you.
Until now I’ve compared competitive video games with sports because of their fake sense of progression and brotherhood. Now let’s think about single-player story-driven video games and how they compare against more traditional forms of media. Take books for example, are they a waste of time? Well, it comes down to a key difference between books and single players games. Books can be either fiction or non-fiction but video games can only be fiction. There are no life-changing finance games or life-changing self-help games, but there are books and plenty of them.
I do think, however, that 99.9% of all fiction works are a waste of time. The only exception are books that are only half-fiction such as important religious texts, these specifically will teach you a lot about the genesis of your own morals and psychology. Another exception might be novels with heavy philosophical and psychological undertones such as those by Kafka and Dostoevsky. “Apollonian” art as some would call it, art that differentiates itself is worth watching and contemplating.
The rest of art — paintings, movies, TV, etc. —, yes, is still a waste of time, but one that doesn’t keep you thinking about for as long. When you watch a movie that’s it, there is no element of “replayability” which keeps you thinking about it since you already know the everything that is going to happen. In case you are wondering, that’s bad because “Dionysian” kinds of art, pure entertainment, shouldn’t sap your attention and brain power after you’ve watched it.
Quitting.
I think that, for your own sake, if you are older than 18, you shouldn’t play video games AT ALL. Nothing, niep, nada. Not even after work, not even after being productive. What you lose after just half an hour of gaming is so great it will set you back for the rest of the week. They are much more addicting than they seem. Personally it took me three years to quit.
What makes it so hard is that you are attached to the friends you play with as well as the drug itself. Even if quitting video games is easy, quitting friends is not. For as many times as I would uninstall League, I would install it as soon they called me. Am I supposed to just disappear from the call? Yes, the quickest path is, very unfortunately, to distance yourself from your friends and to delete your accounts and items.
At a very young age, I realized we were just friends with the drug. I noticed we didn’t spend any time together outside of school (mandatory presence). If the time we spend out of school, was in a video call (virtual presence), can we really say we were friends? Going out with this group of people was once every few months, 7 out of 1 times it was someone’s birthday. But then we stopped going even to birthday parties. Again, just distance yourself slowly, you can reality-check them all you want but it wont save them.
The next step is to find a replacement. Find good habits to replace video games that will actually serve to rehabilitate you in some sense. Good habits that will get you back in shape and back in touch with reality. For me that was bodybuilding. Soon after I started going to the gym, I was able to quit video games entirely. For me it was the gym, for you it might be something else.
Good luck.
