Zeno

It's odd, but now that I'm more than three weeks out from the last time I played a game, I am thinking about games all the time. I've even had dreams inspired by games - including rather twisted, revisionist Assassin's Creed story. Even when I was playing a lot, I never had dreams about games. On the other hand, now that I think of it, my dreams had become quite dull and repetitive, when I was playing all the time. Now, at least, they are more vivid and creative, even if they do sometimes incorporate elements from games. When I'm awake, I find myself trying to plot my return to gaming. Maybe if I set up a gaming computer in another room, away from my home office, I'll be able to manage my habit, I try to convince myself. (Wait: Is this the bargaining phase of grief?) How soon until I can afford to build a new gaming PC? How long until I can actually buy a new graphics card, without having to sell one of my children?? (That last bit was a joke. I think my now-adult children would object! The state of the graphics-card market is frightful, though: NVIDIA 30-series and even 20-series cards are not in stock anywhere, except from scalpers on ebay, with a 200% markup.) And that brings me back to being grateful I sold off my graphics card. My current state of agitation - including the fear of missing out on updates to my most favorite sandbox adventure/survival game - will pass, if not by the 90-day mark, then certainly by the time I would be in any position to build a new gaming PC, or even to sneak a graphics card into my soon-to-be-fully-downgraded home-office PC. By then, I hope, I will be so well established in a new way of living in the world, and even of living in my household, that I will no longer have any interest in games. Writing is still going well, though I have been more distractable this week. Teaching is winding down for the Spring term, here, and I'll have a couple of weeks after that to get ready for my Summer courses, which I will be teaching asynchronously online. That means, once I'm vaccinated, I'll be able to travel to visit my mom and my siblings, who live about a day's drive north of here, in the Great Lakes region.

That's good of you to say, @Theresa. Thanks. I've had a very good week, since last I posted to this journal. I kept to my new habit of writing for at least two hours every morning on weekdays, the result of which was a complete draft of a journal article I've been meaning to write for over a year. It's actually the revision of a shorter paper I presented at a conference in The Time Before the Plague, but I still needed steady focus and an ongoing effort to coax it into something like a final form. I've also done more to clean/organize/reclaim my household, and had long conversations with my kids over dinner about our shared history. We have taken to referring to them as "family therapy" sessions, and each one brings some new revelation about how we each experienced the decline and fall of a 26-year marriage. One idea that has taken root, this week, is that I have been focusing in on those projects and hopes from my past that are worth holding on to - my academic work, helping my kids to launch into the world, cooking and baking, music and dance - and paring away everything else. I'm remembering how much I loved to read, even when I was a kid, and now I have both the time and the place - not to mention shelves full of books I meant to read along the way - to devour one book after the other. I'm still working my way through Isaiah Berlin's Liberty in the evenings - kind of geeking out on his vision of a pluralistic, open society on (classical) liberal principles - but have moved on to Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle for bedtime reading. I've also been playing fiddle more, and joining in Friday-night remote dance-related events from my local community and sometimes one up in the D.C. area. Yesterday there was also a special online event sponsored by a national organization devoted to music and dance honoring the life and legacy of a New England fiddler, dance caller, and dance organizer, who has been stricken with ALS after a lifetime of drawing people together to dance and make music. Imagine a Zoom meeting with nearly 700 unique connections, many of which would have included more than one participant/viewer. It was very moving, and a reminder of a kind of connection and community that is very rare in the present day, kept alive in little corners, here and there. Today, I went out to a park where my local dance group was holding an unofficial get together, including a jam session. The music-making wasn't the most satisfying ever, but I got to play music with other human beings, in person, sitting in the shade along the margins of woodlands on a perfect spring day. I haven't been quite so productive this weekend, though. I've spent a little more time than I should watching random videos on YouTube. I think that's all right, though. I'll aim to hit my stride tomorrow morning, when I sit down to write, again. Oh, and one quick update: I'm still waiting for the CPU for my computer downgrade. It cleared import control/customs early in the week, but there seems to be an ongoing delay in the hand-off from the international shipper to the postal service, which will handle the "last mile" and eventual delivery. So, maybe this week?

Welcome! Could you tell us a little more about your situation, your history with gaming, and your hopes for the future? That will help everyone who is active on the forum figure out how best to support you through the difficult first steps of quitting. Also, keeping a regular journal for a while can help you to get some perspective on yourself and where you'd like to be going.

Why, yes! Yes it can!

It's not just our own minds or habits that account for this, but the technological and economic systems in which we are entangled. In my lifetime (just over half a century) the number of things in my surroundings designed to draw my attention and reward my distraction with a hit of dopamine has increased exponentially. Television and radio laid the foundation, but the Internet and smart phones have made distraction-junkies of us all. Even when we look for "news" or try to learn about something online, we are only skimming for information, for little particles of "fact" that may be gathered quickly and painlessly - or entertainingly or distractingly, for that little dopamine hit - so that we never really engage fully with a text. So hyped up on distraction, is it any wonder it can be so difficult to sit quietly, alone, in silence, and to still your mind long enough to sink into a story as it unfolds slowly across the pages of a book, or grapple with an unfamiliar point of view, or scrutinize a line of argument? Reading for understanding takes real effort; it is entirely unlike skimming a Wikipedia entry or the first paragraph of a news story. And we've all be conditioned to avoid such effort. I mean, I'm supposed to be reading and writing for a living, and getting students to learn how to read for understanding, so I should know this stuff, but those things became almost painful to me when I was spending so much time gaming. Quitting gaming and cutting down my time online generally has restored to me the ability to pay attention, to sit quietly with a even a very difficult book and work through it. ___ One more thought (added later): One thing you might do for yourself is to set aside 60 minutes in which reading is the only thing you're allowed to do. Also, if this is winding down to sleep, having a "screen curfew" can help with that; I've been trying to have all screens off by 9pm, though I'm not yet consistent on that. Any screen exposure just before bedtime will disrupt your sleep; that's just a matter of neurology!

I've been on the site for about two weeks now. Gaming mostly seems to be part of a long-ago past, at this point, something I used to do in an entirely different era. I do occasionally snap through the frame into gamer-world, but it seems so much less appealing, now; it barely amounts to a temptation. It does help that I got rid of my graphics card, so that I didn't revert to gaming when the pull of gamer-world was stronger; I have not one shred of regret for doing that. I'm wondering, though, whether I'm at the limits of what I can do with this journal, other than to check in once in a while to document the new directions I'm going in. Over these past few days, I've come to understand that my attachment to gaming was more a symptom than a source of my troubles. Going after the sources may be work for my own innermost privacy, and for support structures focused on recovering from divorce and on overcoming challenges in professional life. Still, I'm grateful for this site and this forum, and for all of you, for helping me to get the "key log" pried loose so I can move on. So, after this, I'll post occasional updates, and I'll check the forum now and again to see if I can be of help to anyone. Until then, be well.

Spring Cleaning One thing I didn't say about yesterday's housework is that my initial intention was just to wash the bedding. But then I got annoyed by the ugly piece of wood sticking out from the side of the bed, and noticed the dust along the baseboards, and fell into just over two hours of steady work until the room was in order and clean. I even vacuumed the blades of the ceiling fan. Today, I intended to clear my desk and sort some papers, mostly in preparation for building and setting up my new desktop PC, I hope by next weekend. I ended up working for about five hours straight, until all the drawers in my small cabinet were organized, the filing was done, the books were all arranged on the shelves, and every surface I could reach had been vacuumed . . . including some of the walls! At one point, about midway through, I was overcome by melancholy, thinking of all the wasted opportunity not just of the past few years, when I was lost in gaming-world, but in the years before that in my increasingly toxic marriage. I kept working, though, and as things came into order again I saw the room had been transformed . . . and so, in some small way, had I. Spring cleaning, this year, is not only a chance to clean my house, but to make it my house, to be lived in on my terms. Oddly, as my house comes into order, my mind comes into a new kind of order. The melancholy is still lurking around the edges, though, and I think it may be connected with the fact that the world I'm entering now is unfamiliar, and I have a powerful sense of time passing, of old days being left behind, of nostalgia and regret and loss. My work involved letting go of things, overturning the comfortable familiarity of my surroundings, however cluttered and dysfunctional they may have been, and it hurt some. But I also have a sense of renewal, of expanding possibilities. These are things I would have been incapable of feeling or of working through when I was gaming myself into numbness. Sure, there wasn't so much pain or regret, but there also wasn't much hope, either.

I'm not sure when last I listened to music while working around the house. It's been a few years, a good habit lost in the frenzy of bad habits. I've started deep-cleaning my home office, and this is the sort of thing I've had playing in the background: Darol Anger is a phenomenally gifted post-bluegrass fiddler; I was lucky to be able to take a week-long workshop with him, a few years ago. For this recording, he invited four talented young musicians over to his house to jam and record. "Farewell to Trion" is an old-time tune by a fiddler from Alabama; he wrote after being laid off from his job at a mill in the town of Trion, Georgia.

My new trophy display: On the top shelf are books I've finished reading since I quit gaming; on the lower shelf are books I have lined up to read, not including books I'll be reading for my ongoing research projects (for work). Not shown are three books I'm currently reading: Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Phenomenology of Dance (for research), Isaiah Berlin, Liberty (for my side-interest in political philosophy), and Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand, and Stars (for the adventure of it). My goal is to fill the top shelf by the end of summer. I don't think that will be a problem. One interesting shift in my habits of attention: I now have a growing wish list of books I'd like to read. It's a diverse and strange list, some of which may seem random. For example, in looking up a few things for my post on the metaphor of a 'key log', I came across a history of folktales about Paul Bunyan; that's now on the list. Since so much of Saint-Exupery's book is set in North Africa, I now want to go back and reread Albert Camus' The Plague, which has other obvious connections to ongoing world events.

I haven't used it myself, so I don't know how well it works, but I've heard of an app called "Cold Turkey". Apparently, the only way to circumvent it once you've set a restriction is to reinstall Windows. But, again, this is only second hand. You should probably verify for yourself that the app 1) exists and 2) is safe to use.

You might take steps to make it impossible to play. What platform is it on? PC? Console? (I have to confess I'm not sure what "d2" is!) Sell off/get rid of whatever it is you need to play the game, if you can do so without messing up other parts of your life. I sold off the good graphics card from my desktop PC, so now I can't play the open-world RPGs and sandbox/survival/adventure games that devoured my time, but my computer can still do all the other things I need it to do. It may also be a matter of deleting an account or, again on PC, installing an app that permanently blocks the game.

Sometimes it's good to find out you were wrong about something. In particular, I've discovered that the CPU I ordered was not, in fact, crossing the Pacific by ship. Rather, it had been delayed in a shipping facility in Asia until it could be flown across. It seems to have arrived on this continent, now, so I may have some hope of seeing it this week!

Quick update: I now have the case, motherboard, and memory for my computer downgrade, but the CPU is still somewhere out on the Pacific and will likely not get here for another couple of weeks. That's all right, though, as I'm getting by with the ancient graphics card I found in the closet. Meanwhile, I received the money from the sale of my RTX 2080Ti graphics card, which does just about cover the cost of the downgrade. I'm also making arrangements to sell off some other old hardware that's sitting around, which can only help my budget. I spent a couple of hours today cleaning and organizing my bedroom, which included the tricky, irksome, and slightly dangerous task of removing part of a very large and heavy piece of furniture. (To make a long story short, it's a "captain's bed" with a platform supported by two long, low chests of drawers, attached back-to-back underneath so there are drawers along the two sides of the bed. There were "wings" coming out from the headboard to support side-tables with drawers; one of those side tables had broken off . . . about eight years ago. I needed to remove the side-table on the other side, then remove the supporting structure on both sides, but that involved detaching the platform from the supports and sliding it down so I could get behind the headboard. Then I had to push the platform back, lining up the holes for the screws that attach it to the supports - all of this while a large, heavy mattress leans up against the wall.) For eight years I didn't want to bother with all the fuss of dealing with that task. Today I had time, so I bothered. My room looks and feels much better now, and the bedding is almost done in the dryer. I baked a loaf of cinnamon-swirl sourdough bread this morning. Tonight I'm making chili con carne with ancho peppers.

This reminds me that I have an ice cream maker around here somewhere . . .

Especially if it's a batch of ice cream you make yourself. Hobby idea?

One more thought, in addition to the previous entry. There's a sense in which my gaming habit was a symptom of a deeper disorder more than it was a disorder in its own right. This has led me to wonder if, once the jam has cleared and I am well established in a new kind of life, I might be able to play some games without relapsing. The answer right now is: I don't know, and it's far too soon to be making that call. I have to become well established in new habits, first! Actually, I'm quite skeptical that such a thing would be possible, and I hope I would by then also have other, better things to engage my attention, preferably in company with others. Still, if I could ever get to the point that I could spend a pleasant hour or two in a game once in a while, on a quiet Saturday night, say, and then set it aside for days or weeks or months after that, it might not be such a bad thing. It will be at least a year, probably more than that, before I'd be willing to even try such a thing. You know, around the time it will be possible to buy a new graphics card without taking out a second mortgage.

The Key Log In the nineteenth century, lumberjacks in the Great North Woods of the upper Midwest in the United States, would cut down huge pine trees, strip them of their branches, and send them floating down rivers in huge "timber rafts" to lumber mills downstream. (This is the context in which the legends of Paul Bunyan arose, the giant woodsman with his trusty giant blue ox, Babe.) Once in a while, logs would get snagged on some obstacle, more logs would get snagged on them, and so on. Without swift action by the log drivers (or "river pigs"), logs would continue to snag until the river was blocked by a massive tangle of tree trunks: a logjam. These were extremely dangerous, as you could imagine, to anyone just downstream. Just imagine a jumbled mass of tree trunks suddenly breaking loose and rushing toward you . . . The log drivers would be on the lookout for the formation of a jam and try to release the snagged timber before the jam became too large. They would quickly try to identify the "key log", the one piece of timber that, if removed - by main force or with dynamite if necessary - would set the timber raft moving again. In other contexts, I've seen 'key log' used metaphorically for the one thing you would need to change to bring about a cascade of further changes in a positive direction. The mid-twentieth-century forester and writer Aldo Leopold appeals to that metaphor in his hope for the development of a "land ethic" in the final pages of A Sand County Almanac. (If you have any interest in environmental values and environmental policy, that's a book you should read as soon as possible.) I was thinking about this again, this morning, as a way of summing up a line of thinking that developed all through the day, yesterday. Through my adult life, I have developed a number of bad habits, many of them stemming from a sometimes overt tension between my marriage and my professional aspirations, many of them associated with the coming of the Internet and the always-online fire-hose of comforting distraction it could provide. As my marriage disintegrated and I found myself trapped in the wreckage of it, I turned more and more to electronic distraction just to numb myself to the pain and the shame of it. The result seems like a massive jumble of bad habits and the traces of bad decisions, along with a massive jumble of stuff in my household, all of which needs to be cleared away if I am to move forward into whatever is left of my life on this Earth. It seemed to me that I should start with gaming. I must have the eye and the instincts of a "river pig", though, as I think gaming was the key log. Reconstructing my history in this journal and in my own private thoughts, after I'd set aside gaming and gotten rid of my graphics card, and talking with my kids over dinner about our shared history in this household, has allowed all the old bad habits to come to light so I could name their names and let them go. I thought I was setting out to quit gaming, to free up some time and maybe restore some of my ability to pay attention. I didn't realize I would be resetting my entire way of being in the world.

Well, reviewing my purchasing history on Steam - which doesn't include my purchases on EA, Ubisoft, and Epic Games - was good and bad. It was good in that I was able to reconstruct more of my history with gaming, part of my current effort to reconstruct and come to terms with the entire history of my marriage and the earlier trajectory of my career. That's really been helping me a lot, and has bolstered my resolve to recapture the promise of the early years of my professional life. It was bad in that it reminded me of all the games I'd played, and how and why I had enjoyed them, how I was bowled over by the great leaps in technology since that old vector-graphics dungeon-crawler I played back in the 1980s. They were immersive! They were dynamic! Sometimes, they were just gorgeous, with the play of light through trees, a vault of blue sky . . . But, really, if I want that again, I just have to look out my back windows as the sun is rising, or walk out my front door as the sun is going down. If I want adventure and striking landscapes, it's a short drive up into the Appalachians from here; the Great Smokey Mountains are just a 3-hour drive away. In fact, one end of the Appalachian Trail is not very far from where I live. If I want a stunning vault of blue sky, I just have to go home to the American Midwest. (The sound design is really astounding in the real world, isn't it? The Foley effects are always on-point.) And If I want to be in a relationship with someone, again, I'll have to do more than complete a few side missions and pass a few speech checks. At minimum, I'll have to be able to give someone my full attention without part of me jonesing for a hit of that ol' dopamine. That, and I need to be worthy of attention in return. Anyway, all of this got caught up in my dreams. I have not in the past dreamed of games, nor even had dreams inspired directly by games. Last night, though, I had a nostalgia dream for that open-world exploration/survival game into which I've sunk the equivalent of 4.8 months. Later on, closer to dawn, I dreamed I met someone extraordinary - intelligent, sensitive, kind, stunningly beautiful - and there was a spark, a possibility. I woke up feeling hopeful.

A post elsewhere on the forum got me curious about my own recent history of gaming. So, I downloaded the Steam app to my phone, logged in, and checked out my store history. On that basis, I think I can reconstruct a timeline of my descent. ~2007-2013 - dabbled in games here and there, nothing very serious or engrossing; just little diversions I would turn to now and again to pass some time. I gave a lot more of my time over to learning to play fiddle; I'd stopped playing violin sometime around 1991. 2013 - Opened a Steam account. Marriage already getting . . . tense . . . for reasons not related to gaming. 2013-2015 - Still restricted myself - somewhat intentionally - to smaller games, oriented toward puzzles or interactive narrative. At some point I did pick up one of the Civilization games, which I described at the time as being like "candy-coated crack" to my brain. Marriage getting shakier. 2016 - bought an FPS game for the first time, one of the classics of the genre. I also bought a classic trilogy of semi-linear RPGs of the space-opera variety. Oh, and bought in early to an exploration/survival game/experience that would, in the years that followed, suck up about 3500 hours of my life. (I mean, it was delightful, and I'll remember it fondly, but 3500 hours?) By this point, the marriage was in what ended up being its death-spiral; games were my way of not coping with the fact that I was actually trapped in it, alone a lot of the time while my wife found excuses to travel. 2017 - bought my first open-world RPG during a summer in which my wife and kids were away for 5 weeks. It would not be my last. My engagement with social activities - many of them related to music and dance - began to suffer, by this point, though I made halfhearted efforts to boost my enthusiasm for them and try new things. Being a dopamine-junkie made it difficult to focus on actual people, though. 2018-2019 - More RPGs. More adventures. More! More! On the treadmill of hype and gear upgrades and lost weekends. I started caring what happened at E3. It's no surprise that my productivity in my career took a nose-dive during this period: I did the defined tasks required by my job, didn't miss meetings (mostly), taught all my classes, but the creative/productive side of my career withered on the vine. By the spring of 2018, the marriage was basically dead: my wife was living elsewhere . . . with someone else. I finally summoned the will to talk to a lawyer about filing for divorce in the Spring of 2019; I filed later in the summer, and the divorce was finalized in October of that year - just a few months before the pandemic hit. I kept the house . . . and upgraded my computer. I also got a VR headset during the summer of 2019. 2020 - I used games to not deal with the stress of the pandemic, post-divorce stress, grief at the loss of family members and one of my cats, and political upheaval. I upgraded my computer, again, for Christmas, and spent the equivalent of half a month in a shiny new RPG over the holiday break. Then, I kind of hit a wall. Games became dull, but I found myself endlessly starting and restarting one or another of them to try to recapture some of the magic I'd experienced in 2016 or 2017. I would cycle through gaming news sites and video channels for word of the next big thrill. My career called out for help, as it was about to go under. My house called out to be organized and cleaned. It suddenly became urgent for me to figure out who I would become, now that I'm single after a quarter-century of marriage. And here I am. On the whole, the history is shorter than I remembered, and the period during which it became really corrosive is confined to a handful of years. The damage is bad enough, though, and I'm glad I stopped and reconsidered what I was doing.

I don't think I really want to know how much money I spent on Steam and all those other platforms. I would be interested to know the total number of hours I wasted in said games, though, and also to reconstruct the history of my descent after I downloaded steam, lo these many long years ago.

Drift Another idea I've come across helps me to make sense of my experience over the last decade or so. This one comes from one of the pioneers of systems modeling, Donella Meadows, from her posthumous book, Thinking in Systems. (If any of you are looking for something interesting to read, I have to recommend this book. It's an accessible, nontechnical introduction to systems analysis in general, with lots of interesting and provocative examples.) The thing about systems is that they exhibit emergent behaviors (they are more than the sum of their parts), and if you want to change the way a system behaves, you may be in for a surprise: the way the system responds to an intervention is nonlinear, and sometimes dramatically so. Taking an example from farming, she writes: "If I put 100 pounds of fertilizer on, my yield will go up by 10 bushels; if I put on 200, my yield will not go up at all; if I put on 300, my yield will go down. Why? I've damaged my soil with 'too much of a good thing'". (p.91) Systems are everywhere around us and inside us. Our minds are the emergent behavior of complex, self-organizing systems nested together. Which brings me to systems traps, including the one relevant here: the drift to low performance. The mechanism is a couple of feedbacks. The person acting has a performance goal, like writing for two hours every morning, or keeping the kitchen clean. If there is a discrepancy between the goal and the actual state of things, the person takes action, which Meadows describes as "an ordinary balancing feedback loop that should keep performance at the desired level." (p.122) But sometimes people more readily believe bad news than good news. "As actual performance varies, the best results are dismissed as aberrations, the worst results stay in the memory." And then - here's the kicker - "the desired state of the system is influenced by the perceived state," (p. 122) so my own performance goal is ratcheted down. Is my room a little messier than I want it? Sigh. I guess that's the best I can hope for . . . This becomes a reinforcing feedback loop in the wrong direction, toward lower and lower performance. Here is Meadows' summary of the trap: The thing that gets me about this is that I first read this book five years ago, or so, and fully recognized that I was caught in that downward drift myself. I tried to break out of it, but without ever fully committing to the one big step that would help me: getting rid of games and holding the Internet as a whole at a greater distance. My image of myself crumbled along with it: sigh. I guess this is the best I can hope for. So here's how Meadows describes the way out: I think I'm actually doing that last bit, this week. Every day this week has been productive; I've held to my plan, stayed focused, completed my tasks, and largely avoided the Internet. That is now the minimum acceptable standard for a weekday. When I have an even better day, I'll set that as the new standard, and so on, ratcheting the whole thing upward.

Yeah, relapsing can really suck. Not a lot of good can come from kicking yourself too hard, though: you may convince yourself that you're not worth saving! I've struggled with the pandemic/home office thing, and I've helped myself a lot by rearranging some things in my household, supporting discipline with structure. I know from experience it can be harder with a family, and it really depends on the size and layout of your dwelling. Still, is your home office a separate room? Would it be possible to set up a spot outside your home office for other kinds of activities, like reading? There may be some negotiation involved. Also, what time(s) of day do you game? Focus on those as times to develop a new habit. At least, those are the things that have been helping me. I hope they may be useful to you.

It's good that you have an honest friend, and an organized support group. It can be a strange and difficult adjustment, leaving gamer-world, but it's worth doing anyway.

Take It or Leave It, postscript It's my kids' turn to make dinner, tonight, so I'm stealing a moment to write one more addition to yesterday's bit on gaming as a technological frame. If games really function as a kind of boundary object, offering a take-it-or-leave-it-choice, then any attempt at a 1-week "break" or a 90-day "detox" or "A Year Without Gaming" will be futile, because all the while you will still be in the frame, still thinking of yourself as a gamer who is on a break rather than as a former gamer, or as something else in development. Gamer-world is still your world, still your frame of reference; you still make sense of your life in reference to gaming. No, the only thing to do may be to achieve escape velocity or, to switch metaphors back the other way, to leave the boundary object by the wayside, once and for all. Sell your console. Sell your graphics card. Delete your Steam/EA/Ubisoft/Epic/XBox/PS/GoG/whatever account. Blow it all up and walk away without looking back.

I'm in a similar situation: I'm established in a career that gives me a great deal of latitude in how I use my time and where I direct my efforts, and I have some serious job security. It becomes so easy to drift . . . Giving up games, downgrading my desktop PC and rearranging my household to create different work spaces - a chair in the living room for reading, a table in the back room for writing, with a view out over the yard - seems to be restoring my ability to focus and rekindling my ambitions. Maybe that's the key: discovering or rediscovering the internal motivation to make progress toward excellence, rather than waiting for someone to come along wielding a stick.