60 Days Without Playing Computer Games

This week it will have been two months since I last played a computer game. This is quite a feat for me. To give you an idea of how addicted I have been to PC games: I once peed on myself after playing a game for over 18-hours straight. I woke up one Saturday and hopped on the PC to play a new game, a two-liter Mountain Dew at my side, and at some point when it was 2 or 3 in the next morning I finally crawled over to the couch and nodded off. I began dreaming that I was going to the bathroom, and thought to myself: that’s odd. But hey, what do you know, I really was taking a whizz! Oops.

This sad story still wasn’t the trigger for my game abstinence, though. I had been noticing for a while that I was finding fewer and fewer games that I enjoyed, even though I was buying more than ever (usually one or two every couple of weeks). It was almost like I was desperately searching for a high that would bring back the fun of the old classics like Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, the original Civilization, or Master of Orion. MOO nearly got me fired from my first real job when I stumbled into the office at noon after a post-dawn session purging the galaxy of the Meklar and Klackons.

No, the real reasons for this change are two-fold: in general, regular brainwave entrainment exercises have altered my thinking as I wrote about earlier; more specifically, a simple suggestion from Steve Pavlina’s blog about modifying your environment to help achieve desired goals.

Basically, I just deleted all the game-related Windows desktop shortcuts, which had taken up the entire display, and also deleted game-related sites from my browser favorites.

The difference this has made is astounding. I have not even been tempted to start up a game since I’ve done this. I used to check game sites many times every day. Now I realize how utterly stupid a lot of that was; it was just a habit that was reinforced by being faced with constant reminders of games games games.

I still love PC games. But now I realize that I was just robotically buying, playing and reading about them even when they were not really fun. The thought of all the time I wasted makes me sick.

I have read that once you do something for 21 days, then that is a key milestone because it means that you’ve installed a new habit or broken an old one (I have no idea if this is true or not). After 60 days without any games, I think I understand how to control this hobby and make it fun again. I’m going to restrict myself to fixed sessions of games that I really enjoy, like Rome: Total War and World of Warcraft. The great thing is, even after I’ve decided to give myself permission to play games again, I don’t feel an urge to start one up right away. I think I can even wait for Medieval 2: Total War to come out before I start again, and I’ll be free of worrying about future Mountain Dew-related “accidents”.

Written by Parker on August 21st, 2006 with comments disabled.
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