I love games. But games have become the preferred drug of those who are incapable or unwilling to seek actual success in other areas of their lives.
Be honest, what is it about gaming that makes you want to return? Is it the art? Is it the escape?
It’s obviously a combination of all those things. But I believe there is one main reason that keeps us coming back over and over, distracting us from engaging in activities that would produce real success — over and over: artificial success.
It takes relatively little time to get good enough at most games to feel that instant dopamine and/or adrenaline hit from winning a game. Game developers know this well. There are entire YouTube channels that meticulously deconstruct the insidious ways game developers break down your rationalism and convince you that you are winning and never need to look away at anything else in your life. This is why gambling is called “gaming” it’s the same false high.
A little of this is fine, it’s not unlike associating with the character of a fictional story to feel their emotions vicariously. It does promote brain growth and activity. That’s well proven at this point. But what happens when you spend two hours a night gaming and zero hours creating anything of value (according to your values).
I have not only seen this dozens of times, but personally experienced it over and over. I had 4300 hours in Dota2. I craved it. All the open source projects, my business, and my family seemed less important somehow. I did feel guilty, but I couldn’t stop. I had become addicted to the feeling of success, the fake high of that possibility that I would have that perfect game, that forever seemed to elude me (by design).
Eventually, after a very passionate meeting with some of my brightest at SkilStak, we worked ourselves up into a frenzy about just how bad the Internet had become, about how much a new “essential web” was needed with new devices and built on Markdown, not HTML. This idea that I could say “fuck you” to the entire system gave me the boost I needed to propel me back into open source development.
After a year of that I practically forgot what Dota felt like to play. I had replaced that dopamine hit with the unique feeling of elegant code that works in ways I had not dreamed of before, but that was the realization of my own personal vision. Nothing was particularly popular or groud-breaking (for that you need a marketing type to peddle your idea) but it was real, solid, and it mattered in ways that mattered to people that I respected.
They say you can never break an addiction by just quitting. I don’t know if that is true. But I do know that replacing one with another one has worked for many. It worked for me. The best cure to wasting your time doing stupid shit that you think you enjoy, is to discover something else that you enjoy way more. Everyone has something. Don’t pretend you don’t. You just have to keep looking, keep searching for what you want to be, who you are, and what you want to leave behind in this world. What you want, not what others tell you.
And, if that is truly to be the word’s next Dendi, so be it. But even he moved on to greater pursuits. Sports and gaming are not great pursuits. They don’t fucking matter. The sooner you realize that the better. You can enjoy them as past-times and ways to stay healthy, but they are not significant enough for your life. But there is something, its up to you to find it. Most won’t. Most will laugh at this and go back to zoning out like the morbidly obese characters from Wall-E being carted around in front of their screens. That is your choice. If that’s what you want. But most people don’t really want that.