Primmulla

Maybe the best option would be to sell the computer, if you cannot resist using it for gaming? If you need it for work/study, you can always use computers in the local library, university, or a cybercafe (I don't know if these are in the Netherlands, they used to be in Poland and I used to visit one before I had my own PC, but I've read most of them were closed when fast Internet in private homes became more popular).

From my experience, it is cool to get good grades, but getting straight As in all school subject is not the most important thing in the world, and there is no correlation between being an all-A student and getting a great job after graduation. I am a person for whom good grades were the most important thing ever since I began school as 7-year-old little girl. My aim in life was to get good grades in all subjects, even in the ones that did not interest me in the slightest and which I did not plan to study later on. I achieved success in this, but during my school years I had virtually no other interests than learning, preparing for tests and trying to master subjects I had no talent for, such as maths or physics. I loved literature and languages, and I was good at these subjects, but I might have been better if I worked on developing mu talents instead of trying to get As and Bs in maths, physics and chemistry. For me, getting good marks was like an addiction, and what I could never imagine was going to school unprepared or without my homework done. I always had to be well-prepared or at least try my best to learn the subject (the case with maths etc.). The greatest tragedy that could have happened to me during my school years was to get a C. It did happen only once or twice during my school years (from primary school to the end of high school). My parents did not demand that I have As in all subjects, though, I demanded it from myself, and how could I stop myself from fulfilling my own demands? Now, from the perspective of time, I consider the time spent working on cramming subjects, such as maths, lost one, which could have been better used if I perfected my talents then. I did get the good marks, but now I do not remember much of what I crammed (in case of maths etc.), and maybe if I spent that time learning English, I would have been admitted to the university on my first try. Mark that I played absolutely no games in this period of my life, so in a way I cannot blame anything for what has happened. It was a bit different at the university, because I studied what has always been my dream, so that there were no unnecessary subjects like maths I devoted my whole heart to the studies, to learning, and I must say these are the best times of my life. Though it was similar to my years in primary and high school in this respect: learning and getting good marks was my sole aim in life, this time it was more understandable since I loved my studies and the subjects taught at the university. But during academic year, I usually abstained even from reading fiction which was not on the curriculum, since it could "distract" me from my studies. This of course gave me very good results, since during my BA I failed only one test (ironically philosophy, which I studied at high school), and I had never failed any exams, neither in winter nor in summer exam session. I never had to retake any exams. After the finals, I was on the list of the best students on my year, and I got accepted to the MA programme at a prestigious university, while not all of my BA colleagues were successful in it. My BA and MA dissertations both got As, and on another BA studies I was also quite a good student. So, you might have thought there was bright future in store for me, and a career as well, but no. I have not found any job, and I do not mean a job related to my studies (I studied to be a teacher), but literally any job. The teaching jobs went to my colleagues who did worse during the studies and had to retake some exams, while I always passed on the first try and with good grades. And this is why I started playing games, out of frustration with my life, and in a way as a revenge on the society, since I have been a good girl and got nothing for my trouble. So let's be a bad girl now and play games like a junkie, because apparently it does not matter what one does, either way. At least now if I am unsuccessful, I would know why, not like before when I did everything that was believed to give me a happy future. There, I got it out of my system Thank you for your patience

It's great you learn Chinese, I have always been interested in languages such as Chinese and Japanese, I even started to learning Chinese characters, but then I took an online course and panicked that I would never be able to master the tones. Can you give me some advice how to deal with them? Perhaps in a private message so as not to clutter the forum with something which is not relevant to everyone. Thanks

Hello Nice to see another woman on the forum As I have mentioned in my introduction post, I am addicted (or I think I am) to the game LotRO, now after having stopped playing since November, I believe I was attracted to this game exclusively because of its setting in Tolkien's Middle-Earth of which I am a fan since my late twenties. I have tried several other games but quickly got bored by them, and to tell the truth, I am not fond of typically gaming elements in LotRO, such as having to defeat bosses to follow with the story, I wish I could just admire the landscape and go sight-seeing in Middle-Earth. I enjoyed the game because of its setting, but I believe that I should stop playing it because the game is designed in such a way that it is hard to play it in moderation, for example, when you are playing in an instance, you have to complete it and defeat all the bosses in one go, because if you make a break and log out of the game, all the progress in the instance is lost and you have to begin killing all the bosses anew. I hated this mechanics, and I guess it is done purposefully to make players game without any breaks. I also hate doing the same quests again and again, in the game LotRO there are festivals with special quests, and I participated in all of them during the one year I played the game. This time, I took part in the autumn festival as it was held late October, but I was quickly bored because the festival quests were just the same as the ones I did a year before. It was when I decided to take a break from the game (I am still not sure if I want to stop playing forever as it did not affect my life in a particularly negative way). I like your idea of writing a letter to the game, and I agree that women react to games a bit differently than men (in my case, the problem is I am emotionally attached to my characters and the game's world), but I also have another idea. I was thinking about writing fanfiction set in the game, describing my characters' death so that it would help me to say a permanent goodbye to the game and explain to myself why I am not and will not be playing anymore. But I wonder if writing such a text would not be some kind of a trigger since I would have to check some facts in the game encyclopaedia to get it right in my story (I am also a perfectionist). And as to your post, another thing caught my attention and made me thinking, namely what you wrote about people being engaged in something what does not exist, the gaming worlds. As I wrote above, I love fantasy literature, especially Tolkien, I read his books a lot as well as academic works analysing Tolkien's writings. But isn't Middle-Earth (and other fantasy worlds) guilty of the same charge as games, namely, not existing? So what is the difference between being engrossed in a fictional fantasy world in literature and similar (or the same as in my case) world in games? Should I give up fantasy in general, not only in gaming?

Hello to all who learn French or speak it as native-speakers On January 1, I started learning French with Duolingo, where I studied Italian before. I've found an interesting online course about Tolkien and fantasy literature in French, and since I do not speak French, I decided to learn it so that I could understand the course - no matter how funny that sounds Maybe some of the French speakers here can help me in my learning? Thanks

It did not have any influence since I began gaming long after my studies, and I do not want to sound too arrogant, but I was one of the best students at my university, learning has always been important for me, even more so because I was blessed to study what was my real and true passion, so I was highly motivated. One of the reasons I started playing games was my frustration at being unable to find a good job in spite of my academic successes. Though now I remember that I did play some browser games during my studies, one was a game in which I send my knight to perform certain missions, it was not particularly time-consuming since I only had to click on a button to send her on the quest and that was it, I played for some time and then got bored and forgot about the game. Another game I played was a Facebook game in which I played a detective and had to find a set of objects on the picture within I guess five minutes. This game was not time-consuming either, since it was timed. I did play it during my final exam session and when I was nervous waiting for the message from my thesis supervisor whether he would accept my dissertation. Of course, I passed the exams and got a lot of As, I would never allow any game or other kind of entertainment to prevent me from having good marks. Anyway, I was studying systematically each semester, so there was no need for a last minute cramming and panic Also, the game had some positive effects because thanks to it, I reconnected with an old acquaintance who was also using it.

I wonder if there are any differences in how men and women are addicted to gaming? Most people here are boys and young men, and the image of gamers and gaming addicts presented in media depicts them as male. But there are a lot of women who play computer games, though their gaming habits and consequently, addiction is rather different from the ones that men experience. I guess Laney mentioned it somewhere on the forum, though I cannot find the post in question (silly me) that she was attracted mainly to the characters and plot in her games, and from my experience I can definitely confirm it since it was the storytelling in games (that is, both the plot and characters and other things which made games similar to literature) that attracted me to playing LotRO. I came across a funny presentation about women addicts that says that women cannot stop playing because they have emotional attachment to the characters in games and they feel a kind of "responsibility" towards the characters and believe they cannot abandon them. Here is the presentation: http://playingwithresearch.com/2012/01/10/women-video-game-addiction/ From what I learnt here on the forum, for men gaming is mostly about achievement and competition against other gamers. So, it may be concluded that in case of women, gaming fulfils other needs than it does for men, and so, maybe the recover process should be different than the one that Cam proposes? I wonder what other female gaming addicts have to say about it? Thanks for your contributions

I have a little mobile game (I forgot its name) in which the player has to find the words hidden in tiles with letters, I play it from time to time, as you can see not frequently enough to remember its name - is it OK to play it? It resembles something like crosswords or Scrabble. English is not my native tongue so the game is educational for me.

What was your decision, Alex? Did you play over the holidays or not? I was tempted to play but decided not to, as I believe gaming actually creates more problems than it solves. I tell myself that it would be a bad idea to play because it may be fun but afterwards I would have guilty conscience, and in this way gaming would create problems which were not present to begin with. It is not a good thing to do, since I would actually feel worse after gaming than I felt before, so what is the point? Other tricks I use to discourage myself from gaming is telling myself that I had such a long break from gaming that I forgot how to play (in terms of game mechanics, what to press, how to control my character), so I would have to learn it again, and the game would not be fun at all. I also explain to myself that what I remember about the game is not very reliable, as I remember only the positive things, while in reality the game is not as great as I recall it, so I would be very disappointed if I played and it would be a waste of time. Another trick is to do a lot of non-gaming stuff on the computer (e.g. I watched "The Hobbit" extended version), or some work- or education-related things, so that you would run out of your "computer time" (the maximum amount of time when you can use the computer during one day) without touching the game. So far, these ways of dealing with the game are effective, and I can recommend them to others.

If you liked playing "The Witcher," maybe you would enjoy reading the book by Sapkowski on which the games are based? I am not sure if all of them are translated into English, but the first two short story collections definitely are. Alternatively, you could learn Polish in order to read Sapkowski in original version Polish is considered one of the most difficult languages (hard to say if it is true since I am a native speaker and it is quite easy to me) and you would need a lot of time to master it, which will undoubtedly take you away from games

I have quite different experience than the one described here. I am not sure what is meant by "streams" - if it means a live transmission of someone playing a game in real time, I have never seen a game stream. I have only watched films made about the game, heavily edited and focusing on the story-telling aspect rather than on the game mechanics itself. In fact, it was the story the game was telling that attracted me to it, since I discovered that games can be as good at telling tales as literature and films are. And in my case, watching the gaming films rather discouraged me from playing. Firstly because I played primarily to get to know the story, to learn "what happens next," and there was little to no sense in playing when I already knew all what I wanted to know simply from watching the gaming film, since I was familiar with the "spoilers," there was nothing left to be discovered by gaming. And watching the film, I was able to discover another part of the game's story in a much easier and faster way, without having to do anything, simply by watching someone else do all that difficult gaming stuff. I wasn't exactly the best gamer in the universe in fact, I rather sucked at playing and it took me often a long time to defeat a boss so that I could go on with the story, so it was a win-win for me to watch someone else doing these things for myself ( I don't think it is typical of an addicted person, I actually wanted to have some "gaming minions" who would do all the hard stuff for me so I only get to enjoy the scenery afterwards ) Also, watching these films was discouraging in another way, namely, as far as the game's story was concerned, I was far behind the guy whose gaming I was watching, and it demotivated me from playing when I realised how long do I have to play in order to reach the point that he is in now. And of course it is easier to go through the same parts of the game which I saw on the films, but what is the point of watching the same thing twice, first on the film and then while playing myself, when I know the spoilers? It may sound counter-intuitive, but if you were playing the game for its story, as I did, watching someone else to play this game to the end so that you can learn how the tale finishes is actually a good solution. My friend is not a gamer, but she likes watching gaming films and game cinematics just like she watches a "normal" film.

Hello! I have already posted it on other discussion board for gaming addicts, but since it expresses my feelings perfectly, there is no need to rewrite it, so I decided to paste it here. Thank you in advance for any feedback Hello, LotRO addict here! I am addicted to the game Lord of the Rings online, I found out about this game in an on-line course about Tolkien, "Online games, Literature, New Media and Narrative" at Coursera. I have been a Tolkien fan for ages, and this was the only Tolkien MOOC which I could find. The professor in the course was showing snippets from the game, and it was fascinating for me as a Tolkien fan, and I wanted to play this game and "experience" Middle-Earth as if I were there, immerse myself in my beloved fantasy land as never before. What is significant is that I have not played any games previously and generally considered them a silly and brainless entertainment. But as I started playing LotRO, I was more and more attracted to this game, mainly because it was set in Tolkien's Middle-Earth which I was a fan of, and I liked the graphics very much. From August when the course started till today, I levelled up my character to 35 level, and it was the first MMO game I played. I believe MMO are the worst kind of games, they are very time-consuming from their very nature, because just to get from point A to point B in the game it takes a lot of time, so they are not like some other games you can play for a little while, if you do so, you simply achieve nothing in the game. It is not Tetris you can play for five minutes and then quit. So first I was playing the game quite a lot, maybe four-six hours a day, and at first I was not worried because from time to time I have these fascinations, like a new book or a film, which lasts for a very short time and then disappears out of its own accord, and this is an example: I had it with the Hunger Games trilogy, I simply read all the books in three or two days, then watched the movie, read all about it on the forums, devoured fanfiction, fan music etc. and after some time I suddenly lost interest in it completely, and now I don't care about it at all. So, I hoped it would be the same with the game and that it will gradually bore me and I would quit it after some time, just like it happened with Hunger Games, without doing anything in particular to stop myself from gaming. I believed that the game is attractive to me only because it is so new to me, and as soon as the newness would wear off, I would quit it. At first I was playing 4-6 hours daily, later I played from time to time, not every day, but every two days, for a 2-3 hours in the evening. The longest I went without the game was I believe five days. Today I decided to call it quits and uninstalled the game - I believe it is the best option, just to get rid of the game instead of reducing the time spent playing, because if one does not get rid of the game, it will continue to tempt them. The installation file of LotRO is quite large, so once it is uninstalled, I would have to go to great lengths to download it again, and I hope I would be to lazy to wait for the download The game did not cause much problems in my life, I am currently unemployed, so I guess I started playing out of boredom and to experience something new. The rationale behind my playing which I used to justify myself was that I want to find a job as a game translator and to do so, I must needs know something about games, I cannot just start doing something like this without having played a game. But now it's enough As I mentioned, I am currently unemployed, I graduated from my studies (where I always was a good student), so the game was not interfering with my job or studies (anyway, I would have never put a game before getting good marks). The problem is I am terribly shy and I do not have any friends, except one friend who is my pen pal (or rather e-mail pal) - I noticed that I began to neglect writing to her because of the game. I also read less than before, and I have always loved reading. I am an adult but I am still living with my parents due to unemployment, and my Mum was sometimes worried about me playing too much. I used to play for three or two hours in the late evening, let's say until midnight but I never pulled an all-nighter playing. It also seemed to me that it is easier to fall asleep after I have been playing, since I was relaxed then. The game helped me to relax, but I also noticed that it caused some eye fatigue, after playing my eyes were itching, it was much more intense after playing that doing something else on the computer, such as watching films or writing e-mails, and it made me decide to quit the game. Also, I spent a lot of time fantasising what I would do next in the game, where I would go with my character, which quests would I accept. I watched a lot of walk-through videos and read the game encyclopedia to find out how to do certain quests - symptoms of being addicted. Now I wonder if I have not overreacted, but I try to keep these feelings at bay and I have decided never to play the game again, though I already feel I miss it. Sorry for grammatical and lexical mistakes, English is not my native language; I live in Poland. I pasted it here since nothing significant really changed, and this post describes my gaming experience quite aptly. I started gaming when I was 29 after attending the online course, and since summer 2014 I played on and off - when I played, I used to spend a lot of time on the game, but I did not neglect my duties in any particular way, though I read less, which started to bother me. Since this post quoted above was written, I returned to the game a couple of times, though every time I returned I spent less and less time playing. I played since August 2014 but there were some breaks in my gaming, a month when my laptop broke down, another month and a half when I gave up gaming for Lent. And now I have not really played since the beginning of November. I do miss the game sometimes, and I am still not sure whether I was really addicted to it. I also have dreams about the game quite often, though in these dreams the game looks quite different from what it is really like. I used to watch the LotRO videos to learn "what happens next" but I try to avoid them now as I guess it can be detrimental to my giving up the game. The thing is I did not grow up with computer games, and I got hooked on the LotRO game because I was a Tolkien fan long before I even heard about the game, and it was the possibility to immerse myself in Middle-Earth which attracted me so much to the game. I tried some other games such as Dragon Age but played them only for a short while before dumping them completely. It is only to LotRO that I kept on returning. Since I decided to give up the game (it is really only one game in my case, not gaming in general), I also try to stay away from Tolkien's books and Peter Jackson's films as it seems to me they may trigger my interest in the game. The thing that worries me is that I believe my passion for Tolkien's Middle-Earth has to go together with the game if I am to be cured of it. What do you think of it? Do I have to steer clear of Middle-Earth books and films to free myself from the game?

I would heartily recommend reading, this is a great activity and it fulfils some of the needs gaming provided you with, such as following a great story. I am a Tolkien fan so I cannot plug him enough and from the names of the games you mention I can guess that you may enjoy fantasy literature. I have also recently started crocheting, it is a bit like my gaming experience ( at the beginning it is really hard and I had to stop every time I made a little loop for a chain just like I stopped my character in a game when I wanted to change direction she was going towards), and I have read it is quite relaxing (maybe not when you are a beginner, when it is quite infuriating not to be able to do a simple crocheting thing), and when it is learned well, you can make really beautiful things I associate the crocheting experience with gaming since just like in the case of gaming, whenever I failed in doing something, I tried again until I was successful, and it is the same with crocheting.

It seems to me that maybe you are too harsh on yourself, you stopped playing games but you do need some form of entertainment and relaxing activities, so you do not have to cut listening to music or tv from your life. I guess you are too focused on completing your tasks and doing everything in the order you have decided upon before, it looks like a hard work and no wonder you are stressed, you have put yourself under too much pressure, not eating when you are very hungry because you have not completed your tasks is definitely not a good option. I would not be surprised if you return to games quickly, since you removed all kinds of joy and fun from your life, under stress you may be very tempted to go back to gaming. I love reading books so I can recommend them as a great relaxing activity, if you are learning a foreign language and are an advanced learner, you can try reading books in this language, it would be a pleasure and at the same time you would not feel as if you are wasting time since it would be also very educational.

In your article, you state that one of the factors why games are addictive is their social side. Though I play a MMO, namely LotRO, I have never been interested in the social side of playing and play almost exclusively solo, except a couple of times where I accidentally banded in a (very short lived) fellowship with some random players. By accidentally I mean I was not actively looking for someone to play with, they just invited me to a fellowship as they were in the same area. I belong to a kinship, but I do not participate in any kin activities (once I "went" for a kin walk only to see how it looks like and I have not taken part in this kind of gaming since), except occasional sharing some festival rewards with other players. Even more, I have never wanted to play with someone else since I would have to adjust my schedule to theirs and this would not allow me to play flexibly when I want. So, the social aspect definitely played no role (bad pun!) in my gaming whatsoever. This is in striking contrast to what you said in your text on quitting games. How should I interpret this discrepancy?