Peregrinator

Hello Everyone, hope you are well My name is John, I’m 30 and I live in England and I’ve let games ruin my life since before I can really remember. I really got into gaming when I was around eight when I got my first computer and started playing Red Alert. I had a lot of problems with being bullied in school and I guess it was just easier to retreat into the world of gaming. Issues outside of my life have continued, but I always returned to gaming as a coping mechanism. Since this time I have had a love hate relationship with games, There have been points where gaming took a back seat but then gradually it has crept back into my life, The real low point was at University ironically in my first year of Uni I had a really good social life but by the time I hit my third year I had relapsed hard into gaming. I scraped a pass in my degree and then spent an eight-month period unemployed and isolated just hammering games till 5 in the morning. I never really did get into the online multiplayer gaming world with the exception of dabbling in world of tanks, I always thought that the atmosphere in those games was toxic and that I wouldn't be able to handle been exposed as a very average gamer...No my poison is management and strategy games, I dread to think about how many hours I have sunk into Football Manager and Hearts of Iron. I am inherently ambitious and since finding a job, I have been very fortunate and been relatively successful career wise. This has been a bit of a double-edged sword however as it allowed me to blind myself to the fact I was still addicted to games. The passion for my job would always meant it came before gaming, but then gaming came before everything else. I would justify going on games as escapism for stress. Whilst work was fine the social side of my life suffered greatly. I started to recognise this a few years ago when my relationship ended because I was more interested in gaming then engaging with my Girlfriend, I recognised that I literally had no friends , all my mates from uni had long since given up talking to me and I never attempted to maintain my relationships with them because 'the games came first'. This was a wake-up call but I never seriously invested in quitting games, there was always a part of me that was in denial and as a result I gradually slipped back into gaming again. Despite this I did meet someone else and this developed into another seemingly stable relationship we got engaged last year and everything seemed to be going well. I developed a conscious thought process, every time there was an opportunity to go out I would prioritise it over gaming and I would spend time with her. However, in my head I just couldn’t wait to get home and fire up the laptop to play again everything else just seemed bland in comparison. Anyway, this Sunday just gone, she has walked out of the house we share together, she needs time to think about the future of our relationship and has gone to stay elsewhere. She feels we are not nearly adventurous enough. I watched her walk out of the door, and I’m not certain she will return. Needless to say, this hit me like a big epiphanic (Is that a word?) slap in the face Deep down I know that my slip back into gaming is a fundamental root cause of this. This hit of realisation is that whilst I am existing in life I am not living to my full potential. I look back now at all the hours I wasted, I literally have no other hobby apart from gaming. Her leaving was the trigger I needed, I decided right then I had to quit games. So far I am five days clean of games and this forum has already helped massively, every time I have had a craving to pick up the games I have come here and read your stories on this page. I looked up the amount of hours and money I have spent playing games on my steam account, In the past four year I have spent 3300 hours and nearly £2500 on games and going and that doesn’t include time spent on my PS4…it makes me feel physically sick, How much time have I wasted on gaming? How much of that time could I have spent on other activities? Going out socialising? Developing new hobbies? I feel this is what I need to help me to start my journey into a new life, one that isn’t dictated by a game screen. I look forward to speaking to you all, keep up the good work and thank you.