Addiction Doesn’t Always Look the Same.

I find it extremely difficult to stop denying that I have problems with addiction. Though my addictive tendencies rarely have to do with drug or alcohol consumption, the impact of said addictions typically has significant repercussions, especially on my mental health.

The three most common threads when it comes to addiction for me have to do with analytics, work and video games. The link between all of them is probably my never-ending need for dopamine as it is a chemical I lack due to having ADHD, which I will dive into in future posts.

Although I’d like to say I’m generally introspective, there are a few things I often avoid introspecting on; which is probably why I continuously convince myself that nothing is wrong and get myself into these situations. Let’s take the most recent example, which I’m attempting to remedy this morning:

I have been playing an online game for almost a year now. Truthfully, by my standards, it cannot even be classified as a game since it requires very little skill.

Much like Farmville or games in the “idle” genre, this game consisted of a series of time-based resources you would spend to complete different tasks.

The shortest way to describe it is that characters were released regularly, all having different stats and elements and it was your goal to upgrade as many as possible since you never knew which would be buffed each week.

Alongside the time-based resource were contests that happened daily, every 3 days, weekly and monthly meaning that a player would have to regularly log in to make sure that they were ranking high on the charts for each of the tasks that they were required to complete. These contests essentially gave you more of the time-based resources or resources that were finite or hard to get that helped excel you for future weeks.

Admittedly, I knew what I was signing up for when I created an account for the game. I’m no stranger to the idle game and have downloaded, reviewed and even written guides for a number of them. So, I told myself I wouldn’t care that much about this one; but that didn’t end up being my reality.

If you’ve played any idle games that incorporate PVP then you know that it is absolutely essential that you regularly place in every competition or you cannot progress. Though who you are placed up against is always going to be random; so some weeks can be extremely easy for you, you may have a streak of weeks that give you neverending challenges and essentially force you to either step it up or forget it.

As I created the account relatively late into the creation of the game, my catch-up was expected to be relatively long; but this wasn’t really the case. Since I’m someone who number crunches and knows how games like this are programmed and the strategies behind them I was well aware of everything I needed to do to get to everything I needed done and would often rank #1 in daily competitions with the others being more difficult simply due to my lack of characters on hand.

I got myself to the final tier of PVP extraordinarily quickly and though I was unable to rank very high, I often denied how much focus I was putting on “a crappy game” to get there.

For example: since there were daily contests I would often need to make sure I was logged on right before the daily reset to ensure that no one was going to out-rank me by dumping all of their resources 5-minutes before to “bait” other players into believing they were going to “win” for the day. This happened so often that it was ridiculous.

I noticed early on that it was an aspect of the game that would cause me to become stressed and ended up making a daily alarm on my phone to remind me to log in to watch the top list before resetting. My heart would always be racing and while most days I was successful, there were many days where a player essentially held onto all of their resources waiting for the last minute to dump them all. I honestly should have stopped the first time I felt my heart race, but I ultimately found ways to feel less stressed about it.

The truth is, I wasn’t thinking deeply enough about the core problem. Why are you playing a game that requires you to schedule your whole day around it? I denied it was a problem for months because if I had something planned for that day or if a family member needed me unexpectedly I would put the game aside for them, but being that those were all relatively rare occurrences the reality is that the majority of the time I allowed the game to dictate my schedule and life.

“You can’t eat until you do X and X” or “Wait by your computer because X is going to happen in X minutes and then you can go.”

This was generally compounded by the fact that I have forms of time blindless and don’t really recognize how long tasks take or how long I’ve been doing something and since it didn’t affect my work life I deemed it as “not a problem.” But it was a problem.

The nice thing about me and my addictions is that I often can quit things cold turkey. I did it in the past with games like League of Legends or Genshin Impact, being able to uninstall them and not play them again; but I often go through a long spiral before it happens.

For this game, it happened this morning while I was in the shower. Before heading into the shower I asked myself three questions:

1. Are you enjoying the game?
2. Is it worth your time?
3. Can you see yourself playing this in the future?

My answer for each was no, but once I got into the shower the thoughts started racing in my head.

Well, if you quit now then you’re going to have to spend a lot of time trying to catch up.

You enjoy elements of the game and love games where you have to resource manage.

But if you do X and X this way and don’t care about X and X you may be able to emotionally cope.

But the reality is… it doesn’t matter. Why the fuck should a video game matter?

No matter what I do, there will always be dailies. There will always be some task that pulls me back in and has me trying to “be the best” in the game. No matter what… this game will make me unhappy.

This game isn’t meant to be casual. Realistically no idle game I’ve ever played or found is going to make you feel good or be able to be played casually. Hell, I discovered that when I modded a bunch of single-player idle games to be able to skip mechanics or get free resources to progress faster. At the end of the day, there is always going to be more and you’re always going to be at base one again.

Quite frankly, I know that subconsciously and I’m sure that I’m going to end up in this position again, especially when I struggle to get dopamine from something else. I cannot stop myself from worrying that this is always going to be a problem for me, especially when my work is in video games. I’ve become exceptionally good at rationalizing poor behaviours like this to myself and since I’m not someone who can really look back on past emotions since I typically forget how I felt (due to the ADHD) I feel like I’m going to have to track the symptoms I have such as my heart racing or dips in swings and simply ignore games that cause such things.

For idle games in general, it’s so easy to say that they don’t take much out of you because you’re not physically doing much for them. You’re not “actively” playing them, but it’s incredibly important that I admit that I’m ignoring the amount of mental space they take. Fuck, just the fact that I would set multiple timers to do tasks is extremely ridiculous. How on earth is that casual in any sense?

The fact that I had so many pervasive thoughts while showering today was an extreme signifier that this game was horrible for me; and while I thought about quitting it multiple times in the past, I always let the “it’s not that bad”win. But truly, is that a way to live? “It’s not that bad?” Boy, that means that it’s still bad. It means it’s still affecting you. It’s still harming you in some way.

So, here’s to kicking another game. Here’s to hoping that I don’t get myself into that spiral again anytime soon. And here’s to say if you’re someone who struggles with a similar type of addiction tendency you’re able to quit and/or stay away from that thing because it sucks.

The fact that I’m actively trying to silence a part of my brain that’s still trying to rationalize how to make that game fit into my life is absolute batshit, but that’s the shitty thing about addictions… your brain is going to continuously justify how it’s not that bad until it’s just no longer a thought.

*sigh*