A big dilemma

[Baylen.]

Hi everyone, 

My name is Jean, I'm 22 and i'm a video-game addict.

It all began when I was 6 years old, at that time, my parents bought me my first video-game console, a Playstation 2. At that point, I didn't really know what to think of it so I tried it out and what I found changed my life forever. I had this thing that could provide me with entertainment on demand, a sense of purpose (feeling like I mattered), non-stopping adrenaline rushes and a break from the painful and too-real thing that is life. Needless to say, this was the start of something big.

Not too long after, I was 8 years old and I was playing between 7 and 10 hours a day. My parents would tell me sometimes that I was exaggerating and that I should do some stuff else with my time but I would answer with dismissive answers only.

When I was 9 or 10, I got a Nintendo Gamecube for Christmas and a Nintendo DS for my birthday the year after. Needless to say, my addiction didn't lessen, when the school bell rang, I would run out of school and towards my house with a massive smile across my face, I was so happy and thrilled to play that new game I had recently acquired. Video-games truly made me happy and made life better than the boring thing that it was before their arrival.

After school, my grandma would be waiting for me everyday to quiz me on school classes in preparation for the Friday exams. I would be playing video-games while she asked me the questions, halfassing them because I was more focused on the games than answering the questions.

2010 arrived and I got into high-school. This were traumatic years. I was bullied heavily, failed an exam for the first time in my life, barely had any friends and felt alone. At some point, me and some people became close friends and the way we related was through video-games. That year, I bought a Nintendo Wii and me and my friends were spending time playing FPS games together after school. Around that time, I also discovered PC gaming, I only had a laptop though so the games I could run were fairly rare but I would play Minecraft, Combat Arms and World Of Warcraft heavily with the settings that I could run. 

Around 2011 or 2012, I bought a Playstation 3. That's where I fell in love with Call Of Duty: Black Ops. I was terrible but eventually became better and my friends considered me to be the best zombies player of their circle. Then, in June of 2013, I discovered The Elders Scroll: Skyrim. This was the beginning of something else. I didn't have a job that summer so I had all the time in the world to play. What happened is that for the whole summer, I would wake up at 4 AM, play, have a rushed breakfast at 9, come back to playing at 9:15 AM, then eat a potato chips bag for lunch while still playing, then having dinner with my mother (a rushed one, of course) at 6, then play until 12AM or 1AM and go to sleep out of exhaustion. I did this for the whole summer. In the darkness of my own room. Also, around 2012, I discovered about music production and downloaded my first music production software. In the beginning, I was terrible, I had no experience in music and didn't have any family members or friends who were composing music, but I was having fun practicing and getting better and better.

I kept playing with my PS3 extensively, racking up the hours up until 2017 when I bought my first gaming rig (PC build). I bought it upon the justification that I needed a better computer to run my music software better it was taking so much RAM and CPU power that my small laptop couldn't handle it anymore. Little did I know that the best specs for music production, are also the best specs for gaming.

At first, I didn't plan on playing video games with my new rig because I was more focused and involved in music production but I downloaded Minecraft nonetheless because I loved the game and I was curious if I could run it easily. The results were incredible, I could run it flawlessly on ultra settings. When I told my long time friend about it, he was super happy about it and told me to create a Discord server so we could all play together, which I did. 

Me and 3 friends then played Minecraft extensively together, having lots of fun and creating great moments. Then, I couldn't have envisioned what came after, but it would change my life forever; I discovered Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege. From the very first video I saw of it, I knew I needed to get it. That very same hot night of August 2018, I bought the game and never left it. 

Till this day, I have a K/D of 1.028 (am therefore pretty average) but I probably have more hours on the game than 90% of the player base (which is in tens of millions). I have over 1,700 hours of gameplay on Steam and close to 700 hours of in-game time on Uplay. At this point, I told myself that I would reach the platinum rank and then would stop cold-turkey, reaching platinum has been a recent goal of mine when I noticed that I was getting increasingly good and if I stop and uninstall the game without reaching it, I feel like it will all have been a complete waste of my life and I will feel absolutely terrible.

I've been asked by my life-coach why I didn't want to go into E-Sports since I loved video-games so much. Truth is, I feel purpose when i'm playing the game but I wouldn't feel it if I made video-games my career. I want my life to matter and I have a pretty incredibly high standard for what actually makes my life matter.

Therefore, I thought about going in medicine because I like biology and the human body and like to help people but I don't feel half as much enthusiasm going into medicine than I do playing Rainbow Six Siege. Plus, video-games have been the cornerstone of my life since i'm 6, dropping them all-together would leave a giant vacuum-like void and I don't know how i'd cope with that.

I have to figure all those things out.

Edited February 17, 2020 by Baylen.

[Amphibian220]

Welcome Baylen. Can you say whereabouts are you from?

I can attest that working with this website correctly produces positive changes in your life.

Leaving games does not produce a giant void, the void was always there. 

Gaming is suppressing your awareness- if you consciously withdraw from the game and start paying attention to the buttons you are pressing, background noises outside, the quiteness of the room- you will understand the void is always there.

You gotta be brave man. if you want to change faster, instill a blackout on all non-essential media and just get involved with people and do the things that are right, give you a sense of achievement and keep you in a positive mood.

Edited February 18, 2020 by Amphibian220

[Hitaru]

Welcome to the forum Jean! 

Perhaps you have to reevaluate your relationship with gaming, it's not black-or-white. Gaming was and is objectively fun and it made you connect with people during some dark times of your life (mine too), so that was a positive thing and you have to give credit where credit is due. But now it's also keeping you from reaching something else, the next exciting level of your life where you define yourself (in broad terms) and set course towards what you want to do with your (limited, sorry for the downer) time. It's a beautiful thing to discover and if games are making it harder for you, then you may have a choice to make in your hands. Never out of resentment for lost time. The woke way (?) is focusing on your potential and thinking about what would 'the best version' of yourself look like.

You'd still have to handle some sort of 'grieving' process, letting go from something that was so relevant in your life, but if you feel you need to do it, then you have to stop in a way that makes sense to you. Is it legitimate to say "I'll reach this goal and then stop"? Yes. But you have to take into account that in gaming, a goal usually leads to another immediately next to the previous one (they're designed to be that way). So yeah, do it in a way that doesn't make you regret or look back, but don't get stuck into procrastinating committing to quit until this or that happens. 

Good luck with everything and feel free to browse the forum!

[Swid]

On 2/18/2020 at 5:17 AM, Amphibian220 said:

Leaving games does not produce a giant void, the void was always there.

This really hits the nail on the head for me. That's why I kept coming back to games, to escape the void. I guess the best way to escape it is to face it head on and work through it. But when I was feeling low that's just too difficult.

[Baylen.]

On 2/18/2020 at 12:17 AM, Amphibian220 said:

Welcome Baylen. Can you say whereabouts are you from?

I can attest that working with this website correctly produces positive changes in your life.

Leaving games does not produce a giant void, the void was always there. 

Gaming is suppressing your awareness- if you consciously withdraw from the game and start paying attention to the buttons you are pressing, background noises outside, the quiteness of the room- you will understand the void is always there.

You gotta be brave man. if you want to change faster, instill a blackout on all non-essential media and just get involved with people and do the things that are right, give you a sense of achievement and keep you in a positive mood.

Hi, thank you for the great message.

I am from Quebec (Canada), I live in the countryside.

I am slowly but surely giving up on these games, i've begun playing less often (instead of 7 days a week, I play 5 or 6) and i'll continue to reduce my frequency.

Edited February 29, 2020 by Baylen.

[Amphibian220]

Great, are you reducing daily hours too? Put a plan to drive down daily hours.

I’d suggest watching Cam Adair’r vlog on nostalgia and workkng with the respawn pack. 

Edited March 1, 2020 by Amphibian220