Intro
Our students are Sora are incredible. They launch rockets, write books, and deliver engaging lectures. But, I’ve noticed a toxic commonality on the fringes of Sora. In fact, of the students who struggle at our school, the vast majority have a common addiction: competitive video games. I know how they feel. In fact, I was them. Video games almost ruined my life. Please, learn from my mistakes.
In elementary school, I set alarms so I could play video games for a couple of hours before school. I loved Star Wars Battlefront and Halo. Many mornings, my parents would find me asleep in the attic with a controller in my hand. This led to serious sleep deprivation in elementary school which may be the predecessor for physical ailments with which I still struggle. In high school, I built my very own gaming computer. I would spend hours every day playing games like Call of Duty and Halo. However, I lost any semblance of balance in my life when I discovered games like Rocket League and League of Legends. I would spend hours every day after school training and grinding the ranked ladder. During the summer, I would even neglect my personal hygiene to maximize the hours I spent in the game. I justified these actions by saying things like “I’m listening to podcasts while I play so I’m basically learning” and “I’m building lifelong friendships”. Neither was true. I was just a garden-variety addict.
Why did I play?
It was cheap dopamine. Video game companies, much like casinos, hire psychologists who study pleasure and habit formation to create a maximally-addictive product. Since the programmers responsible know pixels on a screen will never create a deeply-fulfilling experience, they target our animal instincts to create a game we have to play, whether we want to or not. They don’t care about our happiness, they just want our money. They’re the mafia with a Computer Science degree. To do this, they attacked my motivation from both angles: extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsically, it hijacked two of my strongest drives: the drives for competition and status. Intrinsically, they directly applied the scientific findings of self-determination theory, a theory of intrinsic motivation.
Extrinsic motivation
Competition was a necessary trait for an ancient society. Without a competitive drive, you’re unlikely to beat the tribe across the river in a violent conflict. If you believe in peaceful cooperation and they believe in uncompromising murder, you’re going to have a bad day. Thus, prevailing over your enemy was heavily selected for throughout human evolution. So, these companies frame everything as a competition to trick our reptile brains into perceiving it as a conflict worthy of attention.
Second, video games are designed to generate false milestones or goals. When your competitive spirit wavers, knowing that you’re two games from the “super special weekly loyalty bonus” can keep you going. Furthermore, most competitive games are driven by a ranking or elo system. I was obsessed with climbing the competitive ladder. “I just want to hit diamond rank, then I’ll be happy”, I stupidly told myself.
Intrinsic motivation
One of the most impactful scientific findings in the last century is self-determination theory. This is a theory that explains why people do things, even without a reward. Self-determination theory says there are three things required for intrinsic, or internal, motivation to flourish: competence, autonomy, and relatedness.
- Competence. This is the feeling that you’re getting better at something. For as long as I could remember, I was entranced by the concept of self-improvement. By picking up a book and flicking my eyes back and forth for a couple of hours, I would be able to do things I couldn’t do before. It’s like I could trade my time for new features. Video games capitalized on this fascination. Much like with books, if I practiced some skill in the video game for a couple hours, I would permanently be better and win more games. If I watched just one more informational Youtube video about that game, that might be the difference in my next match.
- Autonomy. This is the desire to have control over your own life. When you’re a teenager, it doesn’t feel like you have much control. When I was in high school, I was forced to quietly sit in rows of desks for 8 hours every day. When I got home, I had to do chores. When it was dinner time, I ate whatever my parents prepared. I am thankful for the privilege in my life, but it felt like I was a passive observer. When I sat at my computer, I was the master of my fate—or, at least the master of a fake character in a fake world.
- Relatedness. This is the desire to belong to a group of people. In most competitive games, you’re playing with and against real people. You may feel like you’ve joined a community larger than yourself. It’s a community of likeminded people with the same values, all striving toward the same goal: victory. In a world where you feel misunderstood or isolated, this can be intoxicating.
The absurdity of video games
For the next few seconds, forget everything you know about video games and imagine you’re a person witnessing the technology for the first time. For five hours straight, the gamer sits slouched in their chair, mouth agape, staring at a black box. Their fingers twitch over the same 8 buttons with no discernible pattern. A few times every hour, the gamer curses under their breath, screams at the box, or cheers in victory. There doesn’t seem to be any cause for these outbursts.
Ok, good. Return to being yourself. Now, for the next few seconds, think about how you feel when playing a game. No, I don’t mean “happy”, think about how you really feel. Do you feel better or worse after a 4-hour video game binge? For me, peeling away from the screen was a very negative experience. I had a dull headache from my excessive screen usage, general anger about my performance, and an urge to give it one more attempt. To borrow the words of Allen Carr, every time I clicked “find new game”, the programmers were convincing me to put on a tight shoe just to get the satisfaction of taking it off. Why was I introducing stress and anger into my life just to climb a fake ladder for internet points? And who was I trying to best? Another person wasting their life by staring at a screen? Furthermore, competitive video games are a zero-sum activity. Somebody wins and somebody loses. You might be thinking, “so what, then the games I win cancel out the games I lose”. But, that’s not how human emotions work. Humans feel negative emotions about 5 times stronger than we feel positive emotions. To oversimplify things, this means you need to win 83% of your games just to break even! Assuming you could conjure even the slightest happiness from the activity you’d be doing otherwise, it becomes obvious that competition is not a good strategy for life satisfaction. Then, there’s the wave of guilt. I knew I was wasting my life. I knew I was ignoring my responsibilities. I wanted to stop.
Now, consider the time you spend thinking about video games. You might be sitting in class, at dinner with your family, or hanging out with your friends. Every second you’re thinking about playing video games, you’re not enjoying a special, temporary moment in time. I knew life was temporary and I didn’t want to waste it by thinking about pixels that some greedy coder designed to manipulate me.
How I stopped
Like any addict, I told myself that I would quit many times. However, I usually relapsed after a couple of weeks. Until I didn’t. As Allen Carr says, “Quite simply, the key to being a happy non-smoker is to remove the desire to smoke. With no desire to smoke, it takes no willpower not to do so”. There was a six-step formula that made it easy for me to quit.
- Admit that you’re an addict. You have a compulsion to play video games that is not logical.
- Recognize that video games are getting in the way of your goals. With all of the time you currently spend playing, you could be doing something else to either get closer to your goals or live a more fulfilling life.
- Recognize the absurdity of the activity. Do you want to spend your time yelling at a little box trying to ‘win’ fake internet points? Let the person on the other side of the screen get what they want. Don’t wrestle with pigs; you both get dirty and the pig likes it.
- Put obstacles in your way to relapse. When I was finally able to stay away from video games, I logged out of the game, deleted it from my computer, disconnected my gaming mouse and put it in the attic, and let a friend change the my game’s account password. If you have a computer or console used solely for gaming, I’d recommend disassembling it and spreading the parts throughout the house. It’s still possible to relapse, but it would take an hour of commitment to do so. Importantly, this includes unsubscribing from every YouTuber and streamer who plays the game. Watching others play the game sparks the strongest craving.
- Change your scenery. During the Vietnam war, the US Government was terrified when it learned a large portion of American soldiers were heroin addicts. Given the lack of activities in a jungle, up to 30% of soldiers had tired heroin and 20% of the soldiers were actively addicted. Politicians were concerned that the returning troops would spark an explosion of drug addiction in the country. So, they tracked every solider’s behavior upon arriving home. The politicians were shocked by what happened. Virtually overnight, 95% of the returning troops who were addicted to heroin had no interest in returning to the substance. This is the most addictive chemical on the planet, much stronger than the addiction to video games, and these soldiers easily and immediately dropped their habit. How did they do that? Simple: they changed their scenery. If nothing in your environment reminds you of your previous behavior, the urge goes away. Knowing this, I rearranged my room, repurposed my gaming monitors into a standing desk for work, and redesigned my routines. This included new morning activities and a more prominent position for my bookshelf.
- Recognize that every day you stay away from games, you are getting better at resisting and getting worse at the game. Every day, resisting the games got easier and easier. A couple of months later, I hardly thought about it at all. In the words of Artistotle, “we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”. Alternatively, in the short-term, think how every day you don’t play the game, your skills are deteriorating. If you return after not playing for two weeks, you’re going to be worse and lose elo or your competitive standing. Do you really want to play the game just to be terrible and lose? Eventually, this line of thinking is irrelevant, but it may help you get over the valley of relapse.
Go forth and conquor
You can achieve any goal. Remove all obstacles and bet on your dreams. Don’t let these greedy programmers turn you into a dopamine-addicted animal. You are better than that. Read a book, go for a run, start a school. Step out of your life as an automaton and grab the reins. If you don’t change now, you’re going to look back at this moment 30 years in the future wishing you had.
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