I'm going to have to say that I have not been playing as many games as I used to, and really it doesn't bother me one bit. I suppose a preface to that would be that I, for the last five to six years, have been deeply involved with a particular online game: ThresholdRPG.
A deeply involved roleplaying game that never stops giving you a challenge, no matter what way you look at it. I started playing this game just out of high school. In the beginning I didn't make much of a deal about it, but one of the most appealing points to it was being able to play it from just about anywhere as it didn't take much bandwidth or time to do stuff. Login/logout whenever you want. I never really played that heavily until later in university and then much more after I finished school. An hour a day quickly slipped into hours a day; we won't go into how many. But for the last five years I played extensively.
What really started to get me was the amount of time I was playing the game when I could have been doing other more productive things. I'm a fairly active person and I am always in need of something to do, else I get very easily bored. ThresholdRPG, Thresh for short, was consuming me and most definitely affecting more than just myself. My parents would call to see how I was doing, and I would continue to play while they talked, being very distracted and disconnected from the conversation. They, in their wisdom and patience, simply would say that they had something to do and would let me go. I also did the same thing to my girlfriend, now wife, whom was living across the country and we only got to see eachother every few months. But still it didn't really bother me. Wow, such an inconsiderate I must be. And I still continued to play.
I never saw the problem as 'that' bad. Yes, we talked about the fact that I played a lot, and that I should prioritise my time a little better; but I was getting all things asked of me done so what was the big deal? Moving out of country and further away from family definitely slowed my playing. We had a whole new world to enjoy and my wife and I were pretty much in a new area alone to adapt. Still played though. Then I got to see the power of games first hand from someone I had known for a quite a long time. I had played games with this person a lot, and got to know them fairly well. But actually seeing their gaming habits made me look, more than once, at what I had been doing. This person had been living a life very similar to mine in the fact that they played games, and I felt that I was playing about as much as them. When I saw how much that actually was and how distracted they were, disconnected from the rest of the people around them when playing, I knew that I had to get a hold of my own gaming.
It took a bit of time, maybe a month or so to delicately ease my way out of Thresh. I didn't want to just leave it, as I have made many friends there and interacted with a number of them on a daily basis. Just disappearing one day without a word would not really cut it. I at least would like to think I didn't leave on a dime. I got a little roleplaying in before I left. Now it has been a few months that I've played for more than an hour, and probably a few weeks that I have not even logged in. I don't particularly miss it and enjoy the 'spare' time I now have to be with my wife and rub her belly and get kicked back by it.
In all, I haven't stopped playing games though. Started playing Minecraft with the neighbours kid. It's a lot of fun and it's more of a let's see what we can do/build today and not a never ending drama of things.
-Another great day
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