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What games have you been so addicted to they started to damage your life?

Started by Sin Agog, October 14, 2019, 09:27:26 PM

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Sin Agog

Hasn't happened to me too often as I've never had a steady enough internet connection to play online much, and I get the impression that the fact that they scratch enough of a social itch to never feel the need to talk to anyone in person makes people way more vulnerable to them than, say, Jak & Daxter.  Has happened a few times, though.  I usually get intensive for a horrible, starved, stinky week then dial it all the way back.  Played Runescape enough to buy a Santa hat, which I guess I must still own if that game's still running.  Bet I could sell it for real money on the dark web.  Got way into a Chinese MOBA called Mobile Legends Bang Bang.  Then when I started repeatedly saying things like, "We're pissing our spirit away here!' to various team members, I realised it was time to quit.  Also had unhealthy bouts with Monster Hunter 'cause it always tantalises you with that next armor piece which only requires you cut off ten more high rank Rathalos tails.

Famous Mortimer

World of Warcraft, around...2006 or so? Home from work, on it til I went to bed, for months and months. Although we organised lots of meets with the guild, so it was pretty social, and it's not like I was doing anything else with my life around that time (broken up from a terrible relationship, living in a scummy flat). So many hours.

Although I did just cut it off pretty much outright, sold my account for about a hundred quid, and still kept most of the friends I'd made playing it. Some people I know had logged serious time - like, a year or more of actual sat-in-front-of-the-PC-playing-it time, by the time it had been out for about five years. A few people I know developed agoraphobia, or pretended to have it so they could quit their jobs, get disability payments and still play the game.

I think my straw that broke the camel's back was when some 15 year old German told me what a twat I was for not healing someone properly. I occasionally think of installing it again and having a go, but I've got about 200 unlistened podcasts in my queue, so it's not like I've got tons of time on my hands.

Sin Agog

Don't do it, dude.  Will be smiling and getting used to the shiny new updates for about an hour, but before you know it you'll be pouring your first drink in twenty-eight hours using nothing but your feet because you just can't tear your hands away from your keyboard.

I find that South Park Warcraft episode a little different from my own experience.  I ate barely anything in those lost weeks.

I had the WoW bug for a while. My friend introduced me to it, he wanted me to join his Alliance guild. I didn't care for their neckbearded overly-serious ways, so I made a character over on Horde instead. Eventually I joined up with a guild there, made a bunch of characters, playing tank, healer, and multiple kinds of dps. Was getting pretty heavy into it.

One thing that annoyed me: our guildmaster created a Ventrilo lobby for us. Most people were too shy to speak, but I went on and spoke with her for a few hours while we played. It seemed to me that we were the only two people there, but when I looked at it, there was a third person lurking silently in the background. Just, you know, listening. Like a creep.

I said, 'Oh there's someone else here. Hey man, how's it going?' And then he immediately disconnected and disappeared. Making himself look even more creepy.

I joked about it, 'Oh-ho, looks like we've got ourselves a little Francis Dollarhyde there. The Red Dragon!'

Guildmaster said, 'Nau nau,' in her Swedish accent, 'Noo need to be rude-ah.'

'But he's the one being rude with his eavesdropping.'

'Some people are jast shy, yew know?'

'Well I don't think he's being shy. I think he's being sinister. I caught him in the act didn't I? Caught him with his trousers down. And the fact he left right away, that proves it.'

'Oh cam on, yew're so paranoid. Yew crazy.'

'I'm not paranoid, I'm a realist. He was probably sitting there rubbing himself all night, and we were none the wiser. You are too trusting. I know what these people are like.'

Anyway, you can get into all sorts of gossip and drama in MMOs, and it becomes a whole life unto itself. I played FF XIV for a while, I enjoyed it and I think it's better than WoW in many ways, but I decided to stop after three months. Not gonna get sucked into all the craziness again.

bgmnts

All video games really. Selling my xbone again. Have to try and do something else.

Thumped my arcade stick so hard I bruised the bone on my little finger.

Mobius

World of Warcraft and Dark Age of Camelot (Everquest style MMORPG) for me.

Played for years and years. 18 hour days, never leave the house. Proper tears if internet or modem broke. Family went to America for a month and I stayed home to play. Would log in and just jump around the main city for hours and hours doing nothing. If your life is really boring, you figure you might as well just be bored in-game instead...

Probably the best time of my life tbh.

Dex Sawash


Fucked my thumbs playing Battlefront 2 (the first battlefront 2 for PS2) and now I can't really play games.

madhair60


Cuellar

Ultima Online. Spent my best teenage years roleplaying an orc. Futile. Actually that was probably only about a year, but I did spend years on that game. Thieving, taming animals with that fucking lute song over and over and over again. I can still hum it, note perfect.

Kryton

Quote from: Cuellar on October 15, 2019, 01:00:15 PM
Ultima Online. Spent my best teenage years roleplaying an orc. Futile. Actually that was probably only about a year, but I did spend years on that game. Thieving, taming animals with that fucking lute song over and over and over again. I can still hum it, note perfect.

God I had some great scams in that game. Tricking people into visiting my snake infested island with no wandering healer. My house vendor selling hugely inflated anti-snake venom potions.

The greatest moment of that game involved someone gifting me a house filled with all sorts of stuff and gold (he was leaving the server). Also wandering around looking at the decay states on houses of people who hadn't logged in for a while and then waiting for the houses to vanish to claim their stuff and sell off the real-estate.

Quote

Spent ages on War Thunder, playing literally every day (you get a daily log in reward), competing in the hideously frustrating events, trying desperately to complete monthly challenges in order to gain one of the rare planes I didn't have in my vast collection of virtual aircraft and generally taking it all too seriously. At it's worst it's one of the most frustrating games I've ever played and yet equally there's times when it's totally sublime. I only bothered with the airplanes and lost interest when the money grabbing and post-WWII focus became too much. I still check in now and again to see what's new and whether there's any nice virtual aircraft I can obtain and then leave gathering dust in my virtual hangar. I get the impression even the developers are losing interest though. I'm pretty rusty at it these days and only play for fun.

I think that fact that it was initially so difficult to get anywhere and I was utterly appalling at it that made me plough on determinedly, just to obtain some basic competence and not feel like I was an embarrassment. I got to the stage where I was pretty decent and could hold my own but never really felt in total control. Playing on PS4 with a pad makes things more difficult anyway so I accepted I'd never be one of those people you see in game wracking up a ridiculous amount of kills. There was also a fairly decent community (by gaming standards) and I was kind of shocked to discover there's people who'll happy escort your slow lumbering bomber all the way to the target for no personal reward, just to be nice to a random player they got thrown in with. Of course there's also the usual edge lords, random abusive message sender's, hellbent on revenge kamikaze's & general teamkilling game spoiling twats.

I still have a vast collection of virtual aircraft, many rare and hard to obtain, which I invariably never bother to use and which almost no one in real life cares about in the slightest. I still feel a certain pathetic pride at having obtained them.

My Grandad was in the RAF and I grew up leafing through aircraft books and being taken to air shows, daydreaming about shooting down a Heinkel etc. That's where my bizarre childhood fascination with aerial death machines came from, a fascination I'd completely forgotten about until I saw War Thunder and discovered a way to live out my childish fantasies.

It also came along at a time when my Dad was seriously ill and in intensive care and I desperately needed some escapism and something to focus on instead of worrying if he'd make it - luckily he did.

Twed

Way too much time on Binding of Isaac in its various incarnations. They kept on releasing expansions to the point where I found it very easy to quit cold turkey, because the prospect of grinding for 100 hours for more of the same wasn't appealing.

PlanktonSideburns

another time, another place - i have some vauge memories of staring hard into a rubbish flash based tower defence game as my life and parts of my rented flat collapsed round me: all these images flash by in the corner of my eye with badly pixelated re-purposed command and conquer components trundle towards inevitable victory:

screaming flatmate,

screaming flatmate leaves

cat paws innefectually at me

someone comes round to pick up the cat

heavy, threatening mail lands through the letterbox: how did they get my adress?

flatmates father turns up to pick up flatmates stuff

not the games fault in retrospect

flatmates fault.

Chollis

WoW also, what a fucking game. Will ruin your life but you'll have a blast doing it.

Cuellar

Quote from: Kryton on October 15, 2019, 01:15:36 PM
God I had some great scams in that game. Tricking people into visiting my snake infested island with no wandering healer. My house vendor selling hugely inflated anti-snake venom potions.

The greatest moment of that game involved someone gifting me a house filled with all sorts of stuff and gold (he was leaving the server). Also wandering around looking at the decay states on houses of people who hadn't logged in for a while and then waiting for the houses to vanish to claim their stuff and sell off the real-estate.

It was an absolutely brilliant game for scams. Had hours of fun doing the old 'FREE REPAIRS - GM SMITH' spam at the forge then just running off with peoples' armour. Then getting dragged into the dungeons by the GMs and being told to stop it.

wooders1978

Binding of Isaac - it's such a spiteful little game that I regularly found myself into a fit of rage promptly followed by a swift uninstall and sulk - rinse and repeat - currently in an "uninstalled" phase

Chollis

Football Manager. Got a shit degree but took Cambridge United to multiple PL and CL wins and got a stadium named after me so swings and roundabouts


druss

Another World of Warcraft vote. Destroyed my social life from 2006-2010.

So with that in mind I thought I'd install WoW classic, just to have a look around, relive some memories. Wasn't going to let the same thing happen again, of course. It will be different this time, I'm older and wiser. To think I let a computer game ruin me, what a degenerate.

The fact I haven't posted much recently is entirely coincidental and you can't prove anything and even if I was playing it a bit then so what, it's a good game, I like it. I'm fine.

Zetetic

Various versions of Civilisation, long past the point I derived any pleasure from one more turn.

I feel that, and Skittles, has given me a degree of insight into the disconnect between enjoyment and compulsion.

AllisonSays

Aye, Football Manager, and while Zet might be being slightly flippant the consistent and at least decade-long series of relapses and falling-off-the-waggons is definitely reminiscent of more deleterious addictions. I can do most of my job on a laptop from anywhere, at the minute, which is a bit like an alcoholic buying a bar or a heroin addict managing a needle farm.

Famous Mortimer

Quote from: AllisonSays on October 15, 2019, 07:21:55 PM
Aye, Football Manager, and while Zet might be being slightly flippant the consistent and at least decade-long series of relapses and falling-off-the-waggons is definitely reminiscent of more deleterious addictions. I can do most of my job on a laptop from anywhere, at the minute, which is a bit like an alcoholic buying a bar or a heroin addict managing a needle farm.
As long as the needles are empty, you're laughing. Now, a heroin addict managing a heroin factory, that might be tougher.

peanutbutter

All the games I was addicted to were back when I was a kid living in the countryside, so it's not as though they were keeping me away from anything better. The only really dumb one was probably my 6 month long addiction to a demo of Championship Manager 00/01 that only allowed you to do half a season, so I done that half season over and over and over and over...

As an adult the closest I've come is a couple of nights where I stayed up all night playing Breath of the Wild and pretty much slept though work, and a  bit of a mental run to redo the entirety of burnout paradise after I accidentally deleted my save.

Poobum

PC games, back when I had one in my bedroom. Rome: Total War, and all of the many mods. I'd always restart, because an Epirote empire stretching from Bactria to Hibernia took me out of the realism. Could never get Europa Barbarorum working though. Lots of Command and Conquer too, trying to build that perfectly ordered base with pretty walls.

Zetetic

Quote from: AllisonSays on October 15, 2019, 07:21:55 PM
Zet might be being slightly flippant
Not at all, I really meant it!

I suppose what stands out for me is that I don't think I've got myself to a situation with booze or anything other 'substance' that I've not kept ingesting without enjoying. That doesn't mean I haven't formed habits, only that I've still had enjoyment around those habits. (Which isn't necessarily a good thing - the habit itself is masked to an extent.)

What I think Civilisation and sugar (broadly) happen to have given me is the experience of being driven to keep doing something over and over again despite very clearly knowing that I won't feel any better, at any point, for doing so and will probably feel worse. (I imagine other people have come to this by other things.)

LanceUppercut

Championship manager 01/02 I honestly dread to think how many months of my life I have lost to this.

Also COD black ops on the Xbox, got it the first day it came out and hammered it for months on end.

peanutbutter

Quote from: peanutbutter on October 15, 2019, 09:56:53 PM
The only really dumb one was probably my 6 month long addiction to a demo of Championship Manager 00/01 that only allowed you to do half a season, so I done that half season over and over and over and over...
Actually, worse than this was getting Championship Manager 3 afterwards (was very hard to get PC games where I lived at the time) and, despite it feeling like a fucking relic in comparison to the demo, stubbornly forcing myself to play it for months in the hope it'd grow on me.

Bazooka

Shadowbane back in the 2000's' (again an MMORPG) that wiped the floor with WoW,DAOC etc etc in terms of PvP gameplay but never reached the notoriety. Spent days upon days farming for my guild,can barely stay awake until midnight now, thank fuck the glory days are over.

Famous Mortimer

I've been watching some speedruns recently, and the number of hours those guys (kids?) put into those games is pretty staggering. Imagine playing one course on "Trackmania Turbo" for 20 hours in order to save a tenth of a second.