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by eswat 3615 days ago
What I've done is change the games I play so it's easier to reframe them as being part of my personal development, hence not feel as guilty about playing them a lot. For me this meant removing games that were too grind-ey (major time sinks with little return on investment) or had toxic communities (very bad influences).

Instead I started playing short, single-player games with strong narratives and interesting gameplay that I could learn from on a mental or spiritual level. Now I treat playing games like I would treat reading books: they have to be a good fit for what I'm looking for and I need to come out of the experience having learned something useful or interesting; there needs to be more than just entertainment value. IMHO this way of thinking about games is a lot more effective than just uninstalling Steam and hoping you never fall for gaben's siren song again.
1 comments
riotvan 3615 days ago
Yeah I need to start doing this. Ima start buying quality games. Already uninstalled CSGO. Screw that game. Thanks for that point of view.
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eswat 3615 days ago
CSGO and the previous games were also my crack and those of my friends. But it's clear now that it's morphed into something that I would rather not be a part of. The betting website shenangians from the past month were a symptom of deeper problem with that game and its community.

You'll definitely find something that would make better use of that time you had filled with CSGO, whether it's a game or not.

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crazypyro 3615 days ago
Not sure that its so much a symptom of a deeper problem as much as the fact that E-sports in general are a new industry and growing considerably. The amount of people involved in the counter-strike scene is at least 3-4 magnitudes larger than it was 7-8 years ago.
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eswat 3615 days ago
CSGO has a lot of players but compared to other popular games with their own economies - with exception to perhaps EVE Online - they don't have as many problems with shady item selling/trading markets as CSGO has. Look at DOTA2 for example.
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crazypyro 3614 days ago
DOTA2 items crashed in value. Before Valve made major changes, the trading market was huge. Same thing happened in TF2. It was just early on in virtual item trading websites. It took awhile, even in CSGO, for jackpot and lottery sites to come about.
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