I would wake up early in the morning, play the game until someone mentioned I should eat, I would eat, then continue playing, until someone mentioned I should eat, I'd continue playing until late at night, go to sleep and continue.
I was extremely addicted and attached to the game. I dreamt about it, I thought about it, fantasized about it.
1 year passed, I started 8th grade and all of a sudden WoW and other computer games were extremely boring. I could play them for about 30 minutes and would just get fed up with any game.
I was like that for years, and just recently I started Super Meat Boy and it had the same addictive fulfilling qualities that I felt when I was a kid, and I could spend hours on it. I completed the game, switched to playing others, but still couldn't get addicted to anything.
I rarely play games now. Max 8 hours total playtime per year.
I would not believe that this was possible if the same thing didn't happen to me. Also about World of Warcraft. Just once.
The next day I got bored killing creatures on some side quest, a thought came through my mind ("what am I doing with my life?"), and I've never looked back.
That's when I realized that dreams are a mechanism the brain uses to train itself in a best-effort simulation of recent new challenges. Probably for committing new learnings from conscious understanding roughly analogous to symbolic AI to subconscious pattern matching more similar to ML. Months after I remembered those minesweeper dreams, I was able to multitask any though process that did not involve eyes and hands parallel to the game, in fact I solved my fastest boards when my conscious mind was completely distracted from the game. (and it was an addiction, and I've grown or of it)
Evolution doesn't tend to waste things. As long as some processing is happening, it might as well be put to good use.
I'm a casual gamer but at times I do lose grip on reality when playing certain games. I feel like understanding what causes the addictive behavior really helps.
For instance most RPG titles employ the same techniques as gambling, and gaming addiction is often equivalent to gambling addiction. Before getting excited about that item drop, think of it as just pure math (probabilty theory) and that it's nothing special about you finding that item.
Unfortunately this type of gambling in video games has a more severe form these days, with the increasing trend of microtransactions and "loot boxes". These can impact your wallet as opposed to just your time.
I am by no means addicted to easy-to-consume entertainment, but I'm worried that it does impact my ability to focus on boring but important things. Could you share what steps you took, or what process you followed, to cut those forms of media out of your life?
Has doing so reaped benefits besides more time to spend on other things?
It's really weird to explain but sometimes when I'm alone and have free day I want to play games but at the same the moment I start them I just can't do it for some reason.
After I moved out, it was an anchor of sorts and I started playing even more. By this point, my gaming habits definitely matched up with the definition of addiction - at one point, I even went ~2 days without sleeping and eating.
The big change for me was getting a job. I couldn't fuck this up (considering I had already flunked out of university, getting a job in my dream field was a miracle), so I quit computer games. I've "relapsed" a few times since and every single time it has been horrible. It consumes me completely. I have now also decided to basically cut out any easy-to-consume entertainment out of my life. I spend my free time on books, nature and sports.
Looking back, it's the experience of totally fucking up my life through addiction that has helped me beat my addiction.