[pmoriarty]

"I wouldn't say that behavior is unhealthy unless it brings you to downright ignore your job/school/responsibilities."

What if you could have done something more productive or rewarding with your life instead, like developed new friendships or deepened existing ones, learned new skills, or read something that opened your eyes or changed your life?

I've probably gamed as much as anyone here, and I deeply regret wasting so much time on it. Though it wasn't a complete waste of time, as it did help me to learn to manage complex systems (I like complex games) and to anticipate and prepare (I like RPG's and chess), and it also helped me to destress, there was also a compulsive quality to my gaming where the ultimate payoff wasn't all that great compared to the many thousands of hours I put in to it.

[qsort]

> What if you could have done something more productive or rewarding with your life instead

That's a bit unfair, though. The same reasoning applies to everything in your life that isn't strictly work. Gaming did change my life, requiring everything to be the most efficient use of your time is simply unreasonable.

[bonoboTP]

But there seems to be a pattern where many people just really regret the hours poured into gaming but don't regret hours poured into learning cooking or traveling or volunteering at a college student group (say taking photos of events) etc.

There are activities that produce long term satisfaction, while other produce long term regret. I don't regret having gone on a canoe trip but I do regret many hours of playing RTS games.

Maybe it's just me and my brain is prone to addiction to games, but it's a loop that's hard to escape. At first it's pleasurable, then I find myself playing through the night, just one more game again and again, I start to gain weight, sleep in, resent the whole thing but crave the fake-accomplishment and dream with the game. I might be an outlier. It hasn't ruined my life though because I always snapped out of it due to some external event that forced me to stop and then I normalize after some days or a week or two of not playing. But when living alone and nobody stopping me, I have definitely wasted months of my life on such things and have holes in my CV due to it.

Nowadays I just refuse to play games altogether. I miss out on some cultural references, but so be it. Same with TV series and binge watching. I miss out on them and become a more boring person but I just cannot do a little bit of these. If I start I'm useless for days or weeks.

It's easier to have willpower to just not start.

[Tarsul]

I think your argument is clear and justified. Our brains are not made for videogames - they are just too addicting for many people. I think our societies (as far as i see) haven't really coped enough with this addictive aspect of videogames - be it parents, teachers, politics or specific clinics (well, in some countries there are already clinics specialized for people who are addicted to video games). China is an interesting case study in that they heavily regulate what kind of games people are allowed to play and also how much and at which times. My personal pet peeve with casino [f2p] (including fifa cards) games is another aspect of gaming that has not been looked at nearly enough, so gaming - although doing more revenue than hollywood (might have something to do with addiction feeding...) - hasn't quite grown up.

[bonoboTP]

I think, just like with other addictions, it matters whether everything else is in place in your life. If you have friends and stable relationships, it's less of a risk. The most difficult part for me was while studying in a foreign country, especially after many (temporary) friends left for their home countries and I didn't know many other people.

[pr0zac]

> What if you could have done something more productive or rewarding with your life instead, like developed new friendships or deepened existing ones, learned new skills, or read something that opened your eyes or changed your life

So the couple years I spent playing WoW back in university did these some of these things for me.

The friends that I played with are some of my best friends 15+ years later with the time we spent playing being a formative part of building those relationships and us still occasionally referencing stories from that time-period. Mind you real-world friends that I later did things like play D&D and other TTRPGs with so I'm not making the argument video games would have been enough on their own.

Getting bored of the time-sink in Wow lead to me investigating game hacking, lead to me learning memory modification and reverse engineering skills, and was my first try at process exploitation techniques all contributing to my eventual career in computer security. That said, I was already interested in the field and if I hadn't been I probably wouldn't have tried those things.

I don't play games very often nowadays but last year, while I was going through a divorce and dealing with depression and some amount of substance abuse in response, playing Disco Elysium was very relevant and contributed a ton to working through the thoughts and emotions around what I was going through. It helped me pull myself out of destructive patterns and I consider it one of the more important pieces of fiction I've experienced personally. That said, it is more or less a really complex illustrated choose your own adventure book so its not quite what most people think of when they think about "video games".

If my qualifications don't make it clear I don't think my anecdotes count as data nor am I discounting your personal experience, but I do feel the time I spent playing video games have been a net positive for my life.