Howdy!

[Demogoblin2]

I'm Demogoblin2, and I've been gaming since time immemorial.

I just wrapped up a really bad gaming binge of Saint's Row 2, my guilty-pleasure-favorite-game. While 10+ hours a day for several days of gaming would be hard on scheduling in any situation, I happened to dive into this zombie state in the midst of a ton of pending homework and group case study projects for my Cyber Security degree.

I accomplished nothing all week except 100% completion in Saint's Row. Sacrificed horrifying hours of work for it. So that means I can finally move on and get back to work, right?

Well I started playing Saint's Row 3 instead.

I've behaved like this since junior high school. I always blamed my lack of progress on my broken home, my alcoholic mom, shiftless dad, and on and on and on, but I came to this realization that my coping mechanism for these things ended up being the biggest problem in my life.

I know it's addiction because I've tried to stop before and couldn't. There's a difference between enjoying something and being addicted to it. I enjoy eating salmon. I do not have 600 cans of salmon in my cabinet, and I do not visualize how I'm going to cook the salmon when I'm supposed to be at work/studying, and I do not spend 10 hours a day cooking various salmon dinners, coming up empty every time.

After procrastinating on all of my homework today, I showed up 2 minutes before class. I was frustrated that I didn't have time to play Pokemon Red on my phone before class started.

That's kind of disgusting.

Games are nothing but counters. You have a health bar that represents a value, you want it to be full. You want the bad guy's health bar to be empty. You want the sword that does 57 damage instead of the sword that does 35 damage. You want to level up to that nice, crisp, even Level 100. This mission is worth 2% completion. Flap the bird between the pipes as many times as you can. It's all counting, all of it. I should be tired of it, but I'm not. As I'm typing, I want to play something.

Anyways, after reaching all of these conclusions, I impulsively googled "Why do I escape from my problems with video games?" This lead to a blog post that linked this forum. I decided I'd try it out, y'all. I'm gonna go for it. I un-installed every game, rom and emulator from my phone and computer, uninstalled Steam, unplugged and packed away my Playstation 4, Switch and Snes Mini. I rifled through various drawers and shelves around my apartment, digging out the stray GBCs and DS lites, PSPs, and any other handhelds I was hording like an alcoholic. I wrapped up and packed my rock band controllers. It's all out of sight. I don't know what's going to happen, but the worst it can be is boredom.

Tomorrow begins day 1. Wish me luck, my dudes!

[DW1909X13]

The very best of luck to you! It sounds like you've taken that first hard step and can now look forward to filling the time with positive outputs instead like your studies or fitness or similar.

You'll get through it and we are all here to support you