Buage_truth
Jul (they/she)Switching to Linux did break my addiction to gaming, though usually I play single player stuff. And then Steam started working, but fortunately crypto came along and made graphics cards shoot up in price and now LLMs have made memory and storage shoot up, so I haven’t upgraded my PC in a long time. So that’s kept me from going back. Now I just play little games on the Switch periodically. But I can’t use those controllers for anything that requires lots of detail control or for long periods., so I don’t play too often.
sp3ctr4lGotta have a healthy relationship with a hobby.
Its one thing for it to be an important part of your life and you as a person… its another thing when it becomes your entire life, when you start throwing away other things, opportunities, relationships, finances, etc, to keep being intensely dedicated to it.
Yeah, totally. I’ve gotten much better at thst over the years for sure. But I know if something like a new Fallout game were to come out or something, I’d easily get sucked back in. So, whether or not it’s clinically an addiction, I treat it like one. Fortunately, I have ADHD, so addictions are easier harder to create and easier to break. But there’s still some compulsive behaviors that can pop up.
I mean, with the amount of dark patterns, micro transactions… that we now have words for those concepts…
A lot of games literally are designed, at the fundamental gameplay level, to wave a theoretical victory/payoff in your face, and give you ladders to climb, that make you feel like you are achieving something…
But it ultimately still ends up being inconsistent operant conditioning, which fundamentally is the same pattern that is at play in behavioral addictions like gambling.
So yeah, a whole lot more things either basically are, or literally are addictive, in the same ways that things that are broadly recognized by society addictive are.
Good on you for being aware of yourself!