This has been one of the only consistently successful techniques to break game addictions.

I only broke my Diablo 2 addiction in college when I used one of those tools that drives your character on Mephisto runs to scum drops.

In the course of one night running it unattended, I got the two items I'd been looking for for weeks. Cheating at the game broke me out of the Skinner box overnight.

I had a hard time with that one. I tried leaving the CD at the office, but late at night when the withdrawal kicked in I ended up driving to the office and fetching it anyway. I truly felt like the meta-story of the game was that the CD itself was the crystal and the player was the traveler.

I like your quitting story. I quit when my very high level character died, in hardcore mode. Thinking about the hours that went into that character was horrifying.

I generally play “roguelike” games (the most important criterion of which, in my opinion, is permadeath), and I often feel the same way.. the thing is that I feel that way win or lose.

This is more or less how I play incremental games. Play until I realize how much time I’m wasting, then switch over to figuring out how to hack the game.

There is always a way :)