Game Addiction - II: How to Defeat Game Compulsion - Extra Credits

Welcome back, folks. We are back today with our good buddy Mac Code to continue our discussion on the topic of game addiction, or if we're calling it what it really is, game compulsion. Last week we addressed the hype surrounding game compulsion and talked about why we felt so many young children spend their days in front of a screen. Today we'll be looking at the problem most often associated with game addiction, adolescents and adults who withdraw from real life in favor of a virtual world. I'm going to tell you right now, this episode's going to be a bit unusual. We've been trying to figure out how to handle it for weeks. James has written and rewritten the script probably a dozen times. I think I've seen maybe 15 different intro paragraphs and 18 different closing statements for this episode since we started. I understand there's also a badly singed book of notes sitting in his apartment somewhere. Every time he's written it, it's just never come out right. But I think we have it figured out now. You see, that whole time we were trying to maintain objectivity on the issue and cover the topic in our usual academic clinical way. But we've come to realize that may not be the best way to go this

time. For James in particular, this topic is a little too close to home, and we decided it's better to just be honest, biases and all. So we're going to do something very different today. Because this topic has much more personal significance for James, I think it's better if he'd be the one to talk about it. So, yeah. Take it away, man. Hey everyone. Dan's probably already told you this, but this has probably been the hardest episode for me to write, and I I couldn't do it. Um, so this is what I got. It's my experience, my experience with game compulsion, and where I'm at now. I had this revelation today, um, because today I talked to the first girl I ever loved. Uh, she'd come back after a decade. Last time I saw her, we were teenagers. Uh, now she's a doctor. I have lots of good memories. I remember kissing her on the hood of my RX-7

before fleeing the city myself for for 8 years. But here we were, reminiscing over coffee about past seemed beautiful lifetime away. Um and we were adults. I watched her laugh with an ease she had never had when we were young. She'd grown and I'd grown and uh in that moment I realized how much better life had become, how far from the awkward child I'd been when she first knew me that I'd come. I realized so clearly how much better life gets when you don't turn away from it, which is something that I once did. Um when people talk about game addiction, they always ask why games are addictive, uh rather than what void do they fill? And right there is where the

conversation goes wrong. When you routinely choose games over things you know to be important or you cease participating in areas of life that you used to find important to play games, you suffer from game addiction or game compulsion. Uh I tried that road. My closest friend sprinted down it. Um but nobody heads that way because their life is perfect. No one picks up a game and becomes an addict. Um when you And well, I guess that's the heart of the issue. Games aren't addictive, but they offer something that is. They offer us uh validation. Often people talk about game addicts as lazy or indolent or incapable or stupid, but nothing could be further from the truth. Uh rather everyone I've ever run into who has had to wrestle with this particular demon at some point in their life was a child full of promise.

And therein sort of lies the trap. I've watched smart, capable people submerge their lives behind the safe unreality of games when the real world uh tells them that all the things they considered good about themselves aren't worthwhile. When with all their intellect, their ability to reason, their willingness to doggedly pursue a goal, they still get dumped or lose their job or get served notice for divorce. At that point, they turn to games because games agree with them that those traits are important. That uh they reward them. Games reward people for exactly those skills. And unfortunately here, at least in the US, high school and college is a time where the world shows us just how little it can care about some of those things that we're most proud of, some of the things that we find best about ourselves. Um for me, it was high school.

I had a lot of things going for me at the time. Um I found my little misfit tribe in the theater group. Later I I had my guitar. Lots of things outside of games I could reinforce my sense of self. And yet, I still walked that road. It started with um started with Ultima Online. I remember the first time I ever taped down keys to make my character run into a wall and play an instrument uh to gain skill while I slept. I felt clever. I went out into the world of Britannia and it was more exciting than my world. Uh it let me tinker, let me explore, excited my curiosity in a way that my classroom work just never did. Um I had played MUDs on my dial-up, so this seemed no different. Uh but it was the first time I routinely lost sleep for a game. It was the first time I found my days possessed by thoughts of an electronic world. During classes, I imagined new character builds. When I should have been doing

homework, I would daydream about that night's run. I told myself it didn't matter. My grades slipped, but I was still passing everything by a wide margin. I still saw friends. I considered it just uh good fun. Um next it was StarCraft. I I found this tiny room um with a computer with internet access uh at my school. It had unrestricted install privileges. Um and uh I started spending most of my lunches there even though uh it's funny because it was the room that the central heat distribution pipes ran through. And so it it had to have been at least 100° in that room most days. Um but I played through without thinking of the heat or the food I should have been eating, what I might be missing out on. Um but in the end it was EverQuest. Uh I was an EverQuest junkie. That's my confession.

My my closest friend skipped school to pick us up two copies on a on launch day. Um he was a year older than me. We had met through theater and bonded over games. Uh he was right there with me over the wire when hunting Ettins in Britannia at 3:00 a.m. Um he was on the LAN when we'd do Battle.net 2v2s. Uh There was this period for 6 months where we didn't speak after he'd stolen this girl I had a terrible crush on. Um but I had been too shy at the time to ask out. He never figured it out though. Uh that should have been my warning sign. He was so focused on games that he never put together why I was hurt. But, in the end, we bonded again over games. All was forgiven. After all, who else would get my inside jokes? Mostly jokes about games. Um for the next few months, uh we were fiends and pushers. I remember that on

the few occasions where we uh one of the few occasions where we actually left the house voluntarily, um was if you if you're familiar with Seattle, we drive up to Aurora, get a cheap PC for another very dear friend of mine, who was an ardent Mac user. He had a Mac sticker on his car. Um but, this was his first PC. Uh no argument could ever convince him to purchase one. But, after we started telling him day after day about the wonders of EverQuest, uh EverQuest eventually won out. Um after that, my grades really started to crash. I I quit the play I was in. Actually angry that I'd gotten a large role, because all I could think about was how it would cut into my grinding. Um I was pretty much living off Hot Pockets and Bugles. Uh I would strategize about how to steal

hours of sleep during classes, classes that I knew I could get through without looking at the text. Um Then it sort of hit its nadir. I I was put on academic probation. Um but, I didn't care. The first thing I did was go play EverQuest to try and forget about it. I actually remember that night, uh we were we were waiting for one of our friends to come from a distant zone. Um and he got on the boat uh to come to our zone, and he never arrived. He just kept zoning back and forth. Every time we did the slash who, we'd we'd see him in one of these boat zones um because uh he'd he'd fallen asleep on the boat. We just kept laughing and laughing. We thought it was ridiculous. Um we we didn't even realize how absurd it was that we couldn't even stay awake playing our own game anymore. That's how sort of

strung out we were. Um But luckily, things sort of changed for me at that point. Um There was a night where we were all supposed to go out to a movie, but me being too much of a at that point, I uh I missed it. Um perhaps subconsciously, perhaps intentionally. Uh I I missed the film. Um Because I didn't I I guess I didn't even want to see our friends. Um And for some reason, it just happened that the the shyest, quietest girl in our group of friends couldn't make it either. And to this day, I don't know why I did something so uncharacteristic for me at the time, but I called her up and asked her if she wanted to go to a later show. By the end of the night, she she was in my arms. Um and after that, things picked up for a bit. Uh she was in charge of lighting at the school play. She got me to sign back up for the play

as a stagehand. Um We talked about colleges. And she showed me all the pamphlets she'd gotten. Um they sent her a lot. She got a perfect score on the SATs. Um and I started getting out more uh and uh it's sort of I mean, she opened up and became more social, too. It was good. Um I cut down my hours and my friend zoomed ahead of me as we neared, I think, 30, maybe 35 on EverQuest. Um Then one day they all showed up at my door. My friends, my companions of my long quest-filled hours. Uh the first thing they said to me was the expansion pack's out. Uh they came in and we started talking about it. And we were going to reroll and start new characters with the new race. They need someone to be their healer. Uh we talked about the new zones

for hours. Uh how they were so much faster XP. How we started plotting about how we could improve faction. Um to make it to the back to the old continent without being killed on sight. If any of you guys If you guys ever remember Kunark. Um And uh By the end of the evening, they told me they'd gotten an extra copy shipped out for me. And I called the girl I loved and told her I I just I needed a weekend with the guys. Um Well, while I'd been gone, they'd they'd actually learned Linux and built a machine and got it set up for ShowEQ. Uh the program it's a program that reads packets uh being sent from the server so they could get all sorts of data like usable map and monster spawn information. All

this stuff. Um It was a new experience. We we were so much faster and better at everything. The new race was powerful. We started blazing through levels. And soon I was there again pretty much every night. Um the same pattern emerged. I kind of let my real life fall apart. I'm not I'm not ashamed of many things in my life. But I am ashamed of how I acted then. Um I let a lot of people I cared about down. I missed a lot of important moments. One day my best friend's girlfriend came to me in the hall and dragged me aside. She told me that the night before she had been begging for him to come to bed and instead he sat there looking at pictures of the new zones. Um by the time she was done crying against my chest and telling me how humiliating it was to not be able to compete with a

video game. Um how she hated these things and had the way she felt. Uh I I mean I went I went to comfort her because I mean funny thing is this is this is the girl that I would have killed for. This is the girl who uh previously before before meeting when I did. Um she was the one who I stopped talking to my closest friend for 6 months over. And yet as soon as she was done crying on my shoulder uh I told her I'd talk to him. But I went back and told him exactly what she said. And then I helped plot with him how he could smooth things over uh while losing as little time at EQ as possible.

Uh I mean I don't know. I said it but there there are few memories I'm ashamed of. I've always tried to live my life by a pretty simple set of beliefs. Do as little harm as possible. Do what good you can. And uh in fairness let nobody call you hypocrite. Um and that's pretty much it. But every time I think about that conversation I used to get this knot in my gut. Um and you know who you are, but I know you're not watching this, but for what it's worth, I'm still sorry. I'm sorry till today. Um The experience that shook me even then, I tried to tell the girl I loved about how I was struggling with this game. Instead, I was rambling. I ended up telling her more about the game and how hard it was to pull away and uh even though I knew I wanted to express to her that I I knew I'd be happier spending more time with her. Um and while I was rambling, while I was

ended up pretty much just telling her about EverQuest uh I was telling her something about the city of Mist when she stopped me and said James, I think I might be pregnant. Um this I I mean this was it. I I shook. This was the great dam of reality crashing down and the floods were rolling in. I held her. I told her how much I loved her, how I'd do anything for her. I told her I'd get rid of all my stupid games that night. I felt so wretched and pathetic and miserable. She had been acting odd for the last week and I didn't pick up on it because I was so wrapped up in my fantasy world. But, it became clear the moment she spoke. Uh it became clear how much I'd missed. How much at of the empathy that my teachers and directors used to laud me for had been cut off by

this filter of another existence. I begged her to forgive me. I promised be more than I was. Luckily, it turned out she wasn't pregnant, but the experience got me to put away EQ and limit myself to console games when I had time to play. I didn't go back to my friends' basement. They got angry at me for abandoning them. They felt betrayed that their healer had left when they were just going to start doing City of Mist. But I found that life will always welcome you back. This is the important thing. I I pulled up my grades. I rejoined theater group. I picked up a guitar. Over the summer I crammed hard for the SATs. I As fall rolled around, I spent my EverQuest hours writing and rewriting my entrance essays. I thought of getting into college as an EQ quest. Um all the skills I had thrown at the game I found that life rewards you for using them. You have to apply them to the right

things and apply them as tenaciously as you did when playing. But still, life welcomes you back. Um I won't ever say that everything was easy or it was perfect. I won't say that I I've won every battle with this so far. But I did end up going to the college of my dreams, gotten to play music in almost every state. I ended up working on the games I love. Um Today, the man who designed the core systems for EverQuest is a close friend. Um the buddy of mine who we got a PC for, we wrote out to Aurora, works at PopCap four blocks from where I live. Um Richard Garriott actually even wrote a chapter for book I did on invented languages. Uh heck, I I've actually even gotten to see almost every Civ wonder that's still standing. Life is pretty good. Um but most importantly, uh I'm surrounded by people who I love

and will join me in all the crazy endeavors I do. I still treat each moment like I did when playing EverQuest. Uh challenges to be conquered through rigor and thought and application. I still pick a desired goal for a lark and try and figure out how to end up there, whether it's being independent designer or getting to talk about games every day of the week with awesome people. Uh I still grind life with the work ethic that the game taught me. Um but for all its lessons, um I paid too high a price for them and my friend never learned them. Uh in the end he dropped out of college before a year was up. He couldn't hold a steady job and he never moved out of his parents' basement. Um The last time I heard of him uh was a few years back. My buddy at PopCap tried to get him a tester position there and he lasted for a few weeks. Um he sort of made games addiction,

games compulsion, a self-compelling self-fulfilling prophecy. He uh uh life didn't live up to his expectations, so he turned from it towards games. But when life offered him opportunities at the first sign of challenge, he'd run back to hiding behind games because he was afraid that life would reject him again. But really life always welcomes you back. You just can't run too soon. I know dozens of people who've struggled with games addiction and every one of them uh who took that terrifying first step of walking boldly back into the real world despite all the prospects of rejection and failure were met with open arms. Once you're past high school, maybe past college, you'll find that life embraces the gamer mindset, that if you use all those things that games taught you, uh and you fight for it, the real world has wonders that you could never find in a game. So,

if I just I know this is going on really long, but a few more quick things. Um first, if you do uh if you feel like you do suffer from game compulsion, don't think of the years that you've spent playing games as wasted years. Don't ever think of yourself as impossibly behind. It's not true. There are always options. Thinking this way just serves as an excuse to continue avoiding the real life for games. Um but you don't have to. Life will welcome you back. Second, junkies put push junk. If one of your friends is trying to ramp down on their gaming or break free of something they consider destructive, don't lure them back in. This has happened to me and I've done it at times. It's bad news. Don't do it. Uh I mean everyone I know who's ever wrestled with this has a story similar to mine where

uh as soon as they first broke free of their gaming compulsion, uh it was their friends who brought them back in. Um and so I mean I guess just don't be that person. We're more than that. Uh and lastly, just know you're not alone. I mean if you suffer from game compulsion, this is something I didn't realize when I was much younger, but uh not You're not alone, not online, and not in the real world. Uh there are thousands people, tens of thousands people who are facing same struggles, and who are battling the same demons that you are. There's The community is there to help you. Gamer show much love. Uh I promise you that members of our disparate family will be willing to help you uh figure out how to get your GED, enroll in community college, apply for a job. There's no shame.

Um in fact, if you have any questions along those lines, uh feel free to use our Facebook page. It's not much, but it's a start. We're going to try and get uh forms ready on the extracurricular forms, and with any luck, they'll be up by the time this video shows uh as a place for everybody to get together and discuss these things and share their stories and uh ask for help when they need it. So, um I don't know. I'm sorry that I couldn't write the more clinical episode about games addiction, games compulsion that I set out to write. But, this is what I've got. This is me laying truth. So, I hope it can do somebody some good because I don't know. If if one person takes a step towards life they want because of all the love that went into this,

it's a bargain. And you know what? I still play games. All right. You can say I'm happy. I do it for a living. I don't have time to play them like I used to, but life's better for that. So, good luck, all of you. I hope we can help.

Mhm.