Several months ago a friend told me about the 90-day detox. He convinced me that it could work, so I decided to go cold turkey after that. I put the date on the calender. I convinced myself that games were trash anyway, because video game developers only care about the broad consumer market instead of the niche gamer like me.
I could already tell that I wouldn't last very long. I spend the entire time watching let's plays on Youtube or just looking through the Steam store or browsing my Steam library. I edited my username on skype and discord to remember both myself and my friends that I quit gaming, this seemed like a good strategy at first, because my friends did stop talking to me about games or asking me to play games with them. After some days of just sitting behind my PC staring at the screen doing nothing aside from telling myself that any moment I would be heading outside, watching a movie or reading a book, I decided to mod games instead of playing them, this should have been a huge red flag. The modding was 99% done with just the text editor, so I wasn't actually playing the game. Yet.
Eventually I decided that I'd need to test the mods in order to be sure that they actually worked and didn't crash the game. Problem was that people could check my steam or discord and see me playing a game and call me out on the fact that I was actually playing games. I eventually found a workaround by using the .exe in the steam local folder that allowed me to play the game without steam or discord showing that I was playing games. I would quickly open the game, see if my mod worked and then close it again. First I did this once a day, then I did it hundreds of times a day. Then I decided to playtest the game for a bit. This quickly turned into just playing the game for many hours a day. I went from 2000 hours played total to 2500 hours played in total in a short timespan. I still used the workaround without really thinking about it, I purely did it to hide from my friends.
Eventually December came around and I got a short vacation. There was also the Steam sale. I bought a bunch of games and started playing them without thinking about it. A friend notified me rather quickly that my username said that I had quit gaming, yet I was playing all these new games. I lied again and told him that I was making an exception for the holidays and I would go back to not gaming afterwards. I was playing games the whole time and I was lying about it.
Now I'm back to doing nothing all day, I uninstalled all my games and I just stare at the screen like before. I like to listen to podcasts, but I can't really do that without playing games, because I can't read and listen at the same time, I can only play and listen for some reason, it's probably just how my brain is wired.