addiction.end

To my beloved IJAH community,


I've been a very, very bad boy. And, in the spirit of creative writing, I'd like to show, not tell you my story -- and its conclusion.


I should've seen the red flags. A few months ago, I was in my high school psychology course (I'm 16) and we talked about addiction. And my teacher, who has a master's degree in developmental psychology, simply says, "you can be addicted to anything."


Truth is, I had some reflecting to do after that. I've played video games a lot. In fact, it was about this point I set my 300-hour milestone in Rocket League -- and I only started back in September.


The psychology class didn't end there. On another day, our teacher had us take a survey and analyzed our results as we said them aloud to the class. I knew I was sleep deprived, but I realized I was more so sleep deprived than every single one of my classmates, except for three other people. Sleep is mysteriously and critically important to our being. When someone deprives themselves of sleep, they begin to commit a very slow suicide. I do not exaggerate.


Then I asked why I was sleep-depriving myself. I was shortsighted though, because I continued to stay up late at night cooking ramen noodles on the stove at 9 pm while I was playing Rocket League, Cobalt, or CS:GO. No time for veggie prep or a salad. So yeah, I'm maybe slightly malnourished because I don't eat much earlier in the day either. And I wasn't doing my homework. It's pretty miraculous that I even got B's. But B's aren't good in America. I know many of you guys are not from America and I'll just say this: B grades are too low for competitive American college bullshit. K?


I mean, I used to get straight A's. Then less A's. Then none. Funny how that fits on a negative correlation with the amount of anger my parents expressed each time I abused my gaming privileges.


About a week before Cobalt was released, I was banned from the computer on weekdays. So of course a few weeks later I was abusing that restriction. Then, I was caught last Thursday by my little sister during my tournament match versus Cocoamix. My sister made sure when she tattled on me to label me an addict. When my mom scolded me and told me to not blame my sister but rather myself, the dialogue went like this:


"I don't blame her. She was being a good sister."

"So... why? Why do it? You know the rules."

"I can't help myself."

"I'm getting the sense that you don't care."

"No, I do, you just don't understand."


My mom continued to berate me, with legitimate reason. She couldn't trust her own damn son to do the right thing. But I proved her wrong by telling my dad I wanted to quit gaming, cold turkey.


Tomorrow, I expect to unplug my $2,500 gaming tower and put it in storage. It now seems I wasted an additional $1,000 on games and in-game purchases -- including a StatTrak AWP Asiimov I bought two days ago. And the new XCOM. But fuck it. I no longer want to say "but I spent money, so it has to be worthwhile." Fuck it. That's what happened when I bought copious amounts of Riot Points in League of Legends, so I kept playing and playing and playing until I actually quit a year after I expected to. Then I replaced that with other games like Rocket League and so on because I needed something else to keep my rapid dopamine release going until a few days ago.

Anyway, I'm sorry. I will be fasting from gaming indefinitely, at least until I adjust to the normal world, and maybe never again after that. SinisterKnowledge must die, for my own sanity to continue.

Oh well. I will still be here on the forums and can keep in touch with you all via Skype mobile. I'll also keep up with the development of IJAH and its community.

I'll miss you all in game.

Sincerely,

Nolan aka SinisterKnowledge

EDIT: for anyone else in a similar situation, this is the resource I used to come to my decision: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTbbu5C5sq9VStQD2gvIN_g

 

By the looks of it, he isn't leaving. He said:

He's only leaving gaming, not the community.

Anyways, I really do hope you beat this, Sinister. Good luck.

 

Why must you suppose every other thread with negative shit is a leaving thread? This is the second I've seen today that you've been proven wrong.

On the other side, story really opened my eyes. It's nice/bad to know what others are going through here, to see how diverse and simular we are!

 

I've struggled with similar issues. I wish you the best of luck.

 

I started playing Cities: Skylines in the middle of Februrary , and I had over 720 hours on it, partly because I left the game running on accident for a couple of nights.

 

Hey, do what's best for you. It'll be hard to quit cold turkey though, unless you have something else you can do in your free time. Maybe take up sports if you like that stuff. :)

 

Good luck, It will be good for you in the long run.