Okay here's my second shot at this thing. Tonight's topic is something I've been thinking a lot lately and especially applies to me, involving how video games can distract us from our social lives, and in some cases, our entire lives in general:
I think anyone who uses this site or games consistantly has also dwelled on this ideal of how video games can drain the life right out of us if we don't regulate ourselves. While some may argue that video games can be used as social activities and in some cases actually bring people together, I find the opposite to be often true. Sure, there's always playing with friends and having LAN parties and wonderful times. However, this is not often the case, and especially if you're like me, someone who does not enjoy playing with friends due to the fact they're not good or knowledgeable enough about the given activity, and you simply just don't enjoy playing with them or feel comfortable doing so. Therefore, gaming can often dissolve down to you sitting in a chair all day playing your MP FPS's online, SP RPGs, exploring vast worlds in adventure games, facing limitless competition in racing games, and wasting your entire life away in the neverending MMOs. I'm sure most serious gamers have done a lot of this stuff before, but I often stop to think: do these games isolate and distract you from the material world? The obvious answer is yes, given how many just play games to get away or in leisure times, including many hardcore gamers. But how much is too much? It may become too much in fact if you've made gaming the main leisure activity of your life and don't find time to do anything or much else other than gaming. People who do this, like me, often start to break off from the material world and just move into the digital world as their main concern. They might become indifferent to normally serious things in the material world and take total concern over things that matter far less, like gaming schedules, winning or losing in game matches, the amount of experience and emblems you have on this site, etc. Now, I find that people eventually realize what is happening to them, and often try to escape. But hold up, it's not so easy now. At this stage, you've often become so obsessed with the digital world that you've been lured into its chains of addiction that cannot be undone easily at all. It can't be too far off to call the internet the most addicting drug of them all for some people. This can also be amplified if you have an already obsessive nature, like I do.
As you might have noticed, this has happened to me as well and I've been trying to escape with no success. But my underlying questions still remain on this subject matter:
1. Why does this addiction exist?
2. Why do some people take such matters above physical and much, much, much more important ones?
3. How can one escape this and come back to their senses?
4. What's something that can be done to avoid it from happening again?
Please sound off and what you think about this and here is a YTMND as a reward for listening: