The guys behind my favourite web show, Extra Credits, have recently done a two part episode on the issue of game addiction, the second part of which is a wildly different format to their usual set up due to the fact that it’s a subject that’s close to home for show writer James Portnow, and consisted of a very heartfelt retelling of his own personal experiences with game addiction/compulsion.

They make the point that games aren’t addictive in the medical sense as they don’t create a chemical dependency, but that they can be remarkably compelling and grown adults can turn away from real life to sink themselves into a virtual one.

They also make the very valid point that if you have fallen into this sort of lifestyle, you are not alone.

I know there are a couple of people who read this blog who politely (and often quite rightly) complain whenever I write something a little bit more personal than usual, so for you guys, this post might be one to skip.

My online life started a lot later than most people.  I grew up and matured at around about the same time that the internet did and our quiet little rural town was only deemed worthy of broadband internet capabilities shortly before I left for university, so I was quite old when I first discovered shared online spaces.  As a result, I don’t have any stories about how gaming tanked my grades or took me away from various other things that I was involved with and I feel I always had a decent balance between games and life.  There’s no denying I have played a lot of games from the age of three to the present, but it has always been when I have some spare time and always tends to be the lowest thing on my list of priorities.

I say ‘always’, but what I really mean is ‘mostly’.  By ‘mostly’, I mean mostly except for a couple of periods in my life where maybe ‘not at all’ is more accurate.

When I first had access to a broadband internet connection and I almost instantly wanted to try an MMO because in my mind they just sounded far too interesting not to get involved with, but having only a £3 an hour job (it was a training wage and my waiter’s training took a lot more time than anyone expected) I wasn’t about to sign up for anything that needed a subscription, so it would have to be a free MMO.

Back at this point, Free to Play was if not a new thing, then an odd thing.  Today you can throw a stone in the internet and hit a Free to Play MMO.  It’s almost considered abhorrent to charge a subscription now, with microtransactions and free/premium dynamics cropping up all over the place, but at this point there seemed to be two options:  Runescape (which I can’t not say in my head as Run Escape) and the recently launched Guild Wars.  After an agonising half hour with Runescape I decided that Arena-net was worthy of the £15 I needed to buy the game that would then be free forever and dived in to it.

I actually didn’t take to Guild Wars straight away.  As an introduction to the dynamics of a team based MMO, I think it’s a lousy one.  It’s a brilliant, well balanced and in many ways unique game, but not a great introduction to MMOs, and so I lost interest pretty quickly.  This wasn’t before introducing it to a friend however, who instantly clicked with the mechanics and is as far as I know still a regular player to this day.  This friend then got a couple of us playing on a more regular basis and I easily lost a years worth of spare time to the game.  It got to the point that I couldn’t remember what I did before playing Guild Wars, had absolutely no interest in looking at any other games, and had no motivation to spend any spare time doing anything other than playing Guild Wars.

Thankfully, my attention span has an inbuilt self-destruct sequence that after an arbitrary period of time, will just sever any kind of emotional tie to a particular activity, hobby or general interest (thankfully not a person as far as I can tell) and let me get on with my life.  After university when I moved to a flat where the internet connection was patchy at best, my interest vaporised shortly after trying to get involved in the competitive PvP aspects of the game and due to lag, getting a torrent of angry abuse that my warrior was standing in the wrong place and that I “should move and why wasn’t I moving and what the hell was I doing just standing there and please just move you useless piece of” approximately 30 seconds after the match had finished.  Instead of breaking my back to fix an unreliable and laggy connection and spending countless hours trying to get whoever was botching up the broadband at this particular flat to do something about it, I just dropped out of the game and carried on with my life.

I’m not saying my life turned around at this point.  I was unemployed, out of work, and doing what I considered to be my very best to find a job, only I didn’t know what I wanted to do, what I wanted to work towards or who I wanted to work for, so I wasn’t in hindsight making a real effort to find work, I was just tricking myself into thinking I was.  What I find interesting is that if that internet connection had been perfect and I had sunk myself into Guild Wars completely, I would probably have blamed the couple of months I spent unemployed eating away at savings as a by product of being hooked on the game, whereas actually I managed to be a bit of loser all by myself.

So far, I’ve only really talked about a near brush with being truly destructively hooked on a game and there’s not really a story to tell there.  Unfortunately, it’s not the only one I’ve had.  Talk to any gamer and there is a high possibility that sooner or later the subject of World of Warcraft will come up.

I’m not going to say Warcraft is a bad game, I’m not going to say it’s destructive or evil or anything like that, but it is remarkably compelling, it is truly well made, finely crafted and carefully honed in on the human psyche in order to keep you playing.  Blizzard have produced a constantly evolving masterpiece with World of Warcraft, but that is only part of what keeps it in the top spot.  The amazing features of Warcraft and the phenomenon that it is will have to wait for another day, but there are many facets about it that are mind blowing.  I know my parents were shocked to learn that there is an underground market for selling virtual gold that has grown into an actual industry around about the time I was trying to explain a news item about gold farmers I wrote up for Bit-Tech.

I had a Warcraft phase.  I’m only really recently out of it.  The reason this blog is called Chaotic Tortoise is actually from a conversation I had in a raid.  I met a handful of people in the game that I would consider friends or good acquaintances, and I had a great time sharing the game with friends I had in the real world.  There was no part about playing Warcraft that made me unhappy as such, but it was a backdrop to a part of my life I am glad I’ve left behind.

Like the possibility that I would have blamed Guild Wars for my inaction after university had I been playing it, there is the possibility that I’m giving Warcraft too much blame when I think back to when I was playing it practically every night, but I think what’s more likely is that it contributed to the inertia I was feeling.

I found myself in a miserable work-sleep cycle in a job I hated that gave me little to no mental stimulation, I was living in a small expensive flat in the middle of Camden with three other people, I had no idea of where I wanted to go with my life or what I wanted to do and I could feel myself free wheeling down a path I did not want to go down.  Propping all of this up was my night-life as a shaman in a friendly raiding guild.

Now, I didn’t play half as much as a real die hard Warcraft player would, but it got to the point that I would come home and be on the game from 5:30 to whenever I decided it was time to go to bed.  In a twist away from other stories I’ve read, I didn’t neglect my relationship with my girlfriend as a result, because she was sat next to me playing too.  I didn’t neglect my friends too much, because I’d often catch up with them at the pub on a Friday anyway.

I wasn’t unhappy, I wasn’t destroying my life, I wasn’t really hurting anybody with my Warcraft habits, I was doing something less noticeable.  I was just killing time.

Time is precious.  Time is a resource that we can never replenish.  If I sat down to really think about and catalogue all the things I really want to do in this world, then I would ironically probably never stop writing it, which would somewhat defeat the point.  Here I was at the end of each day just frittering away the time I had that I could be doing other things with on something that took so much and gave so little back.

Instead of looking for a better job, I’d be levelling a character.  Instead of writing one of my many unfinished novels, I’d be running a dungeon.  Instead of learning a new skill or continuing my quest to become a programmer, I’d be reading up on tactics.  Instead of spending any quality time with my girlfriend, we’d be raiding, probably sharing less of a conversation with each other than the ones we were sharing with people in other parts of the country and all across Europe over our microphones.

It’s a time of my life I look back on with a faint horror because I spent close to four years doing nothing and getting nothing done.  I’ll excuse it and say I was studying part time (back when I thought I might be a lawyer – turns out I was just confused) or I just didn’t know what I wanted to do, but in reality, I was just avoiding the dilemmas in front of me.  I couldn’t break out of my work-sleep routine because doing so meant stepping out of a comfort zone and embracing the unknown.

Warcraft and any online (or offline) game that takes your attention can be fantastic.  It can be interesting, it can change you for the better, and it can provide unrivalled entertainment as well as entering you into a deep social experience, but it can hold you back when it becomes too big a part of your life.  A very long time I wrote a blog post about how I don’t understand how people have to be so binary with their activities such as gaming or even drinking, as moderation should be an option and I just could not get my head around why you have to deny yourself the things you enjoy in life, yet in hindsight, at the same time, I was not taking my own escapism in moderation.

I’ll always protest that I was never that hooked by Warcraft or Guild Wars, but I got to the brink and could have easily been tipped over the edge were it not for a couple of well timed miniature breakdowns followed by my attention-span self destruct sequence about a year later, which culminated in me finally cancelling my now long dormant subscription.

I regret things about my online life.  I regret drawing people back who had managed to break free, I regret introducing it to people who have then suffered similar experiences that might or might not be related to the game and I regret the sense of inertia that it sank me in to.

Two things from James Portnow at Extra Credits that jumped out at me and made me want to write this were as follows:  First of all, life will always welcome you back.  If you “re-enter” life after a period of withdrawal, it will be easier than you think.  To add my own experience to that, if you’ve been on autopilot with your gaming steering the wheel, your life is also remarkably easy to change if you don’t like the direction it’s going.  Sometimes it just takes a little courage to stand up and do what it is that you need to do, and the rest pretty much sorts itself out.  Saying it’s easy is a little unfair, as there will be a lot of emotional pain and guilt and the odd thought of “what on earth am I doing?” but it’s worth it in the end and always less painful than you’d think.

Secondly, and this is something that I really really like, you shouldn’t think of the time spent playing these games as wasted and that it will take too much effort to “catch up” to life.  You will have got something out of your time with the game and to get into the mindset of thinking its wasted time is also to start encouraging you to pour more time in, because the brain is geared up to pour good money in after bad and continually fuel something like this in a desperate attempt to get more out of it or not completely lose and investment.

There is a lot to life and whereas I am probably being a little bit of a hypocrite writing this in from my dimly lit bedroom, there is a lot to see and a lot to do.  It’s not all going to be action packed and nothing will burn you out faster than if you try and do too much at once, but games should not always be at the top of your list of things to do in your spare time.

Games are still great pieces of entertainment and art.  I still think that anyone not playing games is seriously missing out and I still believe that everyone out there likes gaming, it’s just that some of them don’t know it yet.  At the same time, if something can produce such positive effects in people and can enrich people’s lives so much, then there is inevitably going to be a dark side and I believe the abandonment of real life to escape to a virtual one is probably it.