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Hello there,🤔 I recently made the decision to quit gaming after realizing it was consuming a significant portion of my time and affecting various aspects of my life; including my productivity; social relationships; and mental health. It is been about two weeks since I stopped playing; and while I feel good about my decision; I am finding it challenging to fill the void that gaming used to occupy. Before quitting; I would spend hours gaming as a way to relax; escape; and sometimes procrastinate. Now that I am not gaming; I find myself with so much more time; but I am struggling to figure out how to use it constructively. I have tried picking up a few hobbies like reading and exercising; but I have not been able to maintain the same level of engagement or excitement that I had with gaming. I also find myself tempted to go back to gaming whenever I am bored or stressed. Also, I have gone through this post; https://forum.gamequitters.com/index.php?/topic/11009-im-struggling-with-workday-gaming-addiction/ which definitely helped me out a lot. I would love to hear from anyone who has successfully filled the gap left by gaming. How did you maintain a balanced life and find new activities that were just as fulfilling? Did you face moments where you felt tempted to game again; and how did you overcome them?🤔 Thanks so much for your help and assistance.😇

DAY # 1 Time I woke up: 2.00 p.m Time I went to sleep yesterday: 11:00 pm Physical task: Press Exercises Mental task: Meditation 6 mins | Preparation to exam 10|32 Projects: Preparation for exam is urgent one RN Miscellaneous accomplishments: ~ Cleaned all rooms ~ Eated healthy for today ~ No games for today ~ Stayed in touch with grandma and other sublings ( i live alone) ~ Bought some more healthy food Summary of Day #: Even tho i woke up late i didnt screw up my day entirely ( because usually i play games for 3 hours at morning any part of day) i lived really prodoctiveday which i am proud of! So thats was a good day wihtout games after all. What I am grateful for today: ~ GF sharred some of lectures with me for today ~ Flowers that i bought for my grandma for new year are still alive ~ Found a good shorstbloker plugin in general of discord ~ Good snowy day after all, not really cold or wet so just a good weather Over and out! ( Random image XD)

Hello everyone. I have been addicted to League of Legends and porn for 10 years. I am starting a new journey now since I just graduated college and became a Software Engineer. College was supposed to be where you make "lifelong" friends, have fun partying, go to many events, etc. But for me this wasn't the case. The only people that I hanged out with were other Engineering majors who were also socially awkward and didn't like going out. My entire routine for 4 years was Study, Classes, Video Games and Porn at night. So basically almost my entire life has been in front of a screen. Coding --> Gaming --> Porn. I'm a virgin and I have never been on a date. I've never even kiss or held hands with a woman. The fact that I missed out on those is killing me because I am already out of college and I have to put in extra effort now to meet people/women. Now my old friends don't contact me anymore since they are also out of school and moved to other cities. The only leverage I have right now to save my Social life and experience more things in the real world is my job. I get paid pretty well so I'm going to continue to learn more about coding, etc. And use that money to go to events and meet people. I have also started buying healthy foods and going to the gym. I ate burgers and cup noodles almost everyday in college therefore I look like shit.

The concept of my journal is simple: 1 good habit to stick to, 1 bad habit to eliminate, what went well today, what I could have improved on, what I plan to do tomorrow. Aiming more for consistency than quantity of content so gonna keep it short. For my first post I'm gonna list out all of my good and bad habits first then slowly pick them from this list: Good things I wanna improve at: - meditation - learning to control my thoughts - keeping up with news and general knowledge (covid, financial, politics, technology, history) - learn about different industries for career - public speaking (confidence, pronunciation) - time management (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly plan / assignment planning) - exercise and build fit body - gradually reduce procrastination - going out in public alone without the fear of what others think - consistent study / learn something new everyday - typing speed and efficiency - learn Cantonese - game development (pixel art, sound design, game design) - read books - consistently check emails - practise pomodoro and consistent breaks in between work - be more emotionally resilient (not taking everything personally) Bad habits to eliminate: - inconsistent sleep schedule and sleeping late - laying in bed after waking up - staying in comfort zone (try new stuff/activities) - self doubt and keep double check - porn detox --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DAY #0 of Daily Journaling (14/11/22 - Monday) 1. Good habit to nurture: DAY #0: Practise meditation 2. Bad habit to gradually reduce: DAY #0: Sleep at least 15 mins earlier from the night before + no screens 15 mins before bed 3. What went well today / things I'm grateful for: - went cycling for the first time in around 2 months - added some habits, dailies and to do's in Habitica - did some programming on paper on tile shuffling mechanic in Sheep Sheep Game - meditate for 15 mins before sleep on Balance App 4. What I could have done better: - still lazed around a bit and watched too much Youtube 5. Plans for tomorrow: - learn more about Habitica features (rewards, add dailies, to do's, join party) - program finish shuffling feature in Sheep Sheep Game - reenrol for next semester's units Gonna update this journal every night from today onwards. Wish me luck!

Finally decided to start my journey here after discovering this forum a few months ago. I'm a 22-year-old Engineering student who is forced to extend one extra semester in my university because of failed units. Causing my parents to fork out extra money for my tuition and accomodation fees, being behind my peers in starting my career and suffering the biggest dip in motivation and confidence, all because of this game with a funny idea of a car hitting a soccer ball into a goal some might know as "Rocket League". I wasn't much of a gamer since young, but during the Covid-19 lockdown in September of 2020, I got introduced by a friend to Rocket League which just became free to play on Epic Games at the time. I still vividly remember the first time I played it, my pupils were dilated, and I thought to myself: "Omg how have I not discovered this amazing game before? How does such a perfect game even exist?" Looking back at it now, the current me, having decent knowledge of gaming addiction, would have noticed these behaviours as the first danger signs for addiction. But me then lacked the awareness and thought it was just for 'fun'. So I started looking up tutorials online on how to improve and starting practising on a daily basis. I was steadily improving at the game in ranked and even had the ultimate goal of reaching the highest rank (Supersonic Legend) which usually took players at least an insane 5000+ hours to reach. However I let this false sense of achievement get the better of me as my grades fell from my best in the previous semester to my worst at the time, but it went downhill from then on. Rocket League was always my number 1 priority and it was constantly on my mind, even frequently dreaming about it during sleep (not joking). It got to a point where in the first half of this year my confidence and motivation became an all time low that I wasn't even completing and submitting assignments for several subjects, occasionally even having suicidal thoughts as a final resort to escape my dire situation. I got fed up of it and decided to get some help from a university counsellor with persuasion from my close friend. Many different methods were provided to me by the counsellor to help deal with my procrastination but none of it helped in the long term, mostly just to provide enough short term motivation to complete some assignments. I was up to 8-10 hours per day of gaming in my final study week before my final exams, not having studied a single word. Then I stumbled on Cam's Ted Talk and for the first time since I've been down the rabbit hole, I felt a surge of strength and light at the end of the tunnel. Cam's reasoning on why we get addicted to games struck me and I realized I've been using it as a tool to escape all the pain and non-stimulating assignments. Even though it was too late to salvage my exams that time, a switch in my brain flipped and after just 1 relapse during the break after that semester, I've managed to control my urges to play Rocket League and it has been 123 days since then as of this post (woohoo!). I've also learnt that its just particularly Rocket League that I find addicting and not any other games, credited to Rocket League being the only game with its unique game concept. But nowadays the most I do is offline single player games (because there's an end and no competitive ranks) and with my friends only. In fact I've even started to delve into game programming and am currently deciding to make it my career as I find it much more interesting than engineering. However, I'm not sure if its just because of my past addiction to games that I'm into game development or will my tendency to game addiction affect my career as a game developer down the road (any game developers who decided to quit games out there would love to hear your thoughts on this!). So as of now just continuing to hone my skills in game dev and wanting to reach out to more likeminded people in this community plus other places too. I'm still having issues with procrastination and Youtube addiction though, still finding ways to solve them. Thank you so much to Cam for allowing me to be part of this amazing community :). Gonna start posting once every day with good habits I want to cultivate and bad habits to eliminate. Hope anyone who sees my posts can gain something useful from my experiences and feel free to leave any suggestions or comments!

Hello there, I am a 20 years old Indonesian studying in the UK. I have been gaming since i was 5 years old and since 3-4 years ago everything become more intense. I play 18 hours a day or sometimes even more during the holiday season. Since i came to the UK gaming has been the only thing that help me to cope with loneliness since i have no friends here. It's been almost 3 years since i came to the UK for the first time and i havent made any real friendship with anyone. I felt that i achieve something while playing video games. During my first year of uni video games really affect me negatively. I was always enjoy programming during my highschool years but since i played video games as much as now i really drop all my hobbies and my interest towards programming, i became anti social, gain much weight and a lot more bad things. Last year i tried to create a resolution to stop playing as much video game as before but nothing works and i went back to my old habit in a couple of days. Today i reflect a lot about how much of a failure i am in 2019. How much i lie both to my self and to everyone around me about how video games affect me. I'm on the brink of failing my year by failing this semester. I feel that i need to do a radical changes on my life. I need to create a real change and decided to uninstall steam and planning on giving it away to my friend/family. I hope that i will be able to fight my self for my self. I have never written anything like this before and please forgive me if this makes no sense at all. I just want to stop lettting go too much important stuff in my life because of video games and start a journey to evolve into a better person. Hello everyone ?️

I have written and tested a small python script that reads a text file of data copied directly from Steam transaction history to calculate the total spent on Steam games. Spoiler, it's a lot more than I thought it was! Program Code print("The total cost of steam purchases.") transactions = 0 transaction_counter = 0 transaction_history = open("steam-transaction-history.txt") for next_line in transaction_history: if (next_line[:3] in ("Jan", "Feb", "Mar", "Apr", "May", "Jun", "Jul", "Aug", "Sep", "Oct", "Nov", "Dec") and ("\n" in next_line[:14])): print("\nFound valid date: " + str(next_line[:12])) title = transaction_history.readline() while not ("Purchase\n" in title): print(title[:-1]) title = transaction_history.readline() next_line = title if "Purchase\n" in next_line: if transaction_history.readline().split(" ")[0] in ("Visa", "PayPal\n", "American", "MasterCard", "Discover", "JCB"): purchase = transaction_history.readline() transaction_counter += 1 print(str(transaction_counter) + ": " + str(purchase[:6])) transactions += float(purchase[1:6]) print("\nYour total expenditure on Steam is: $" + str(round(transactions, 2))) Instructions Download attached .py script Copy code above to a file with a .py extension in a directory (desktop is fine) ie steam-total-cost.py Log in to Steam (you can do this in browser at steam login webpage if you don't have steam installed) Kudos to you for uninstalling Steam if so. Click {username} in top left -> Account Details -> View Purchase History Scroll down and click Load More ctrl + a -> ctrl + c Create a txt file in the same directory as the python program, naming it steam-transaction-history.txt Open the text file -> ctrl + v -> ctrl + s don't worry about any excess text like Valve info at header and footer of file don't reformat Open your system terminal -> navigate to the chosen directory (ie desktop) If you don't know how to use your system terminal, then search how to change directory, list files in current directory, etc for your OS/terminal. type python3 steam-total-cost.py and press enter you may need to install python; google python cli installation for {your OS} and follow instructions Share the total below. Behold in humiliation how much you and others have spent. 😦 Truncated Output I had no idea I was averaging $17 / month on the steam store for almost a decade, and that doesn't include purchases on other platforms! 🤯 My code is far from perfect and my Python is very rusty. I'm much more familiar with Java. Let me know if you get strange output, unlike what I've shared above.

Update: I will now be posting about my life and achievements here. I have decided i will post whenever i want, and when i come on I will communicate with the community. Notes 1: Started binge watching cam's videos, I forgot how inspiring and helpful they are! Now i will break up hobbies I want to do based on seasons (things i want to learn) Spring: Fishing (or summer) Kite Flying Orienteering (includes hiking!) Canoeing Summer: Sailing Swimming (i can swim but I want to practice my strokes) Barbequeing (I have no idea how to use a BBQ) Diving Fall: going to tag sales (this could be anytime but fall seems nice) Holiday decoration (also anytime based on the holiday but most holidays come during the latter half of the year) Making homemade food (homemade apple cider, pumpkin pie etc.) Pumpkin carving Winter: Snowshoeing Fire building (no idea how to start and maintain fire in fireplace) Skiing Ice skating Home designing (can do anytime but doing it in winter sounds fun, like re moving things) Thing i want to do rn The thing i want to do rn is design an app that helps people get off their phones. According to research Americans spend over 5 hours every day on their phones. I have noticed that like games phones can cause the same feelings; brain fog, crankiness, headaches and more. Like forest, reducing screen time. instead however i want it to show things people can do besides their devices and what negative things come with phones, just like cam for games in a sense. While the app is on the phone, the app will be used for good instead of sucking them in.

FIRST DAY Good things I have finally tidied up room. That took me 3 bloody hours. Who knew my room could accomodate so much dust, Jesus. More than that, I accidentally found the missing part from my MOTTO Racing gear ? That hit me hard. A sudden wave of playing urge almost overwhelmed me but ya boi stays strong. EDIT. Watching video of other people quitting gaming (HOBEDAGA`s story) helped me. especially this guy. He`s a legend Spent time with my father. That was endearing really. We talked, played chess. Too bad I`ve wasted so much time digging my head in sand. But look redemption is what matters here right? It was funny to stumble upon my urge to leave as soon as we talked. I understand why. My father was often asking about my grades, plans for future, thoughts, anything, hell, he really was trying. And me being a depressed junkie, hating that sense of guilt, so dense I could touch it, I would crudely end the convo and rush to my messy room playing computer games with lights switched off. Bad things I feel like shit already. Well it is an indication of me being an addict, right? And I don`t want that. I want to be free. Thoughts Does the fact I am quitting mean that I shall not play again anymore? Should it be as fawl and wrong as doing drugs or commiting crimes for me now? What about this time I have spent playing games? Should I blame myself for it? What if I turn to pro gamer? Like, isn`t it wonderful to be hooked on something and bring bacon home at the same time. But, from the other perspective, say I have managed to become pro, will I be agile? Active? Socially charismatic? Perhaps it`s my brain trying to find a way to play some more Well, here it is, folks! OH! one more thing.. Here it is my visual XP bar for not playing the game ? How do you like it

Hello everyone! I have been playing video games for as long as I can remember. TF2, L4D, CSGO bring me sweet memories when my friends and I were having fun together, I have even dated some girl online. Of course, all of that was fickle so I can`t even play those games anymore because I know I would never have the same fun I used to. That puts me off returning to those games. Rancours? I don`t know, maybe The thing that made me do a first step is being fed up with toxicity and my dissatisfaction with gaming routine. I have always considered myself getting the short end of the stick despite investing so much time into gaming. I just couldn`t be the best there. It really hit home. Recently, I have tried to make drastic changes in my life but always relapsed. The breaking point was dev of game (I have grinded 800h in) announcing that the game would be cancelled soon (it all turned out to be as a christmas joke, it was not the dev, but some other dude). Then I realised how fragile and how pointless that I am doing. I was offended by it deeply but it was like a wake up call. Yet I still relapsed, but bounced back. I understand now what I am lacking. Support and an example of others. So here I am 22, Russia, and I am fond of so many things guys, this is crazy:D front-end programming, game dev, harmonica, guitar, parkour, learning new languages. But most importantly, I am fond of people being nearby. Maybe, the main reason why I ve been playing hardcore is that I just couldn`t make friends and I hated being alone. A lot of going to change after New Year. But here are my goals for now 1. Find a hobby and replace my idle existence with it. Write about it here 2. Pass 90 day detox and comment about it here 3. Get a job and earn good money I ll start my challenge tomorrow because today was the day i relapsed once again.

Hell All, As of now I am trying to learning javascript programming but didn't find any best free course by online, Anyone knows any online book or resource where i can start my journey in programming, Seriously I am so happy if anyone share some tips with me about javascript programming.