Synthesised sunk-cost fallacy
Another chain which tied me to excessive gaming was my reluctance to leave behind that which had been built up over many years. Not just online RPG characters and rare digital items, but friendships. Friendships which had lasted years. I never met most of my online gaming friends in person, but I’d shared ideas, memories and all kinds of things with them. Some of those people had been important to me, and perhaps one or two of them were even more like family.
It was hard to leave them behind, but I made the decision to do so because none of them were interested in moving on (not at that time anyway). In fact, once I stopped raiding regularly in WoW, most of those friends which I had felt close to before, just started to drift away. Also, I should mention that a fair few of them felt no shame in bugging me to come back online to help them run dungeons or go raiding, despite knowing that I was trying to move on. Every time that happened, I had to ask myself, was that the behaviour of a good friend? In the end, I felt that it wasn’t.
I had always felt a responsibility to hold on to friends, and surely that’s something which any good person would do? However, the reality for me as I got older, was that friends come and go. People change, or just change how they want to spend their time. I think after my education was finished, friendships typically formed in the areas of life where I put time and effort. Whether it was through work, sports, or other hobbies, friendships typically blossomed where I shared common interests with another person. So when I decided that I wanted to change my life and get away from excessive gaming, I had to accept that most of my friends would have to change too.
Going back to those aforementioned RPG characters and rare digital items, I hate to admit it, but they were hard to let go too. Not to mention the knowledge, skills, and experience which I felt would all go to waste. Phrases like “LF2M Tank+RDPS Strat UD” has no meaning in RL, but if you were logged in to WoW in 2006, you might have felt a grin cross your face if you were playing a Warrior in want of a particularly shiny shield.
However, all was not lost. A lot of those skills which were developed in WoW turned out to be valuable in RL. Without realising it, I had developed leadership and social skills, not to mention confidence through mastery experience. I was never the best player on the planet, but I knew my s**t. And once I was an experienced player, and able to help others, it had felt great to do so. I had climbed a social ladder, a strange one perhaps, where kudos stemmed from a digital character’s items and guild rank, but still some form of social strata.