Habit or Hook

Addiction, amusement, compulsion, distraction, pastime, habit, hobby, hook, infatuation, fad, fixation, obsession, passion… Is playing computer games a habit, a hook, an addiction, or something else?

I remember when I lived in the UK in my 20s, it was common to class smoking as a habit, but that really downplayed the situation for many people I knew who were smokers. They were not habitually smoking, they were hooked on it. I might even say that some of them were addicted to smoking, as shown by their failed attempts at quitting. They knew it was unhealthy, smelly and expensive, but many of them simply could not stop smoking, even though they wanted to.

These days I don’t try to classify particular activities as addictive or not. For some people, smoking really is just a casual habit, enjoyed on occasion at social events, and for those people it might make sense to classify smoking as a habit. But what does it matter?

I don’t think it’s useful to endlessly debate whether gaming is good, bad, habitual, addictive, or otherwise. I think what really matters is paying attention to one’s own relationship with gaming. Although I dislike using the word addiction to describe my own past situation, my low point with gaming would seem to indicate that I was addicted to computer games at one time. I haven’t cut them out of my life completely, but I have set some limits which allow me to enjoy them without getting too sucked in. The limits which have worked so far are not barriers to things I want to do, but rather genuine desires about how much I want to interact with games, so they don’t interfere with progression in RL:

* I don’t want to play MMORPGs again.

* I only want to play games at the weekend, for a few hours at most.

* I enjoy playing couch co-op games with friends or my girlfriend, and avoid other games.

(* I also playtest simple games I’m making on my own.)

I never say, “I can’t play MMORPGs again.” I say, “I don’t want to play MMORPGs again.” And this is true, I don’t. I don’t want to be in that situation again, where I value the progress of a game character more than my own RL, as it’s simply a crappy way to live. If I were to say “I can’t play MMORPGs again”, it would suggest that I still want to, but attempting to resist the desire to do so.

There’s a famous quote from the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation which has a lot of truth in certain situations: “Resistance is Futile”. Resisting doing something I enjoyed was often futile, especially when stress levels were higher than normal. The better strategy was not to resist something I wanted to do, but to target the desire I had to do it, and then gently turn its volume down.

Back then, the more I played games, the more I wanted to play them, and so by playing games less and less, week to week, the desire was gently turned down. Instead of playing a particular game “just a little longer”, I would stop playing it just a little earlier. Instead of focussing on the activities in games which gave the most pleasure, I played in other ways, or found other games to play. Instead of finding excuses to play games, I would find excuses not to.