So, lately I’ve been seeing some posts on gaming and I’ve been wondering. I’ve been playing Roblox for an hour and I plan to hit my usual time of 4-5 hours. I do it to pass the time.
Addiction is not about how many hours you play, it’s about how much it interferes with other priorities.
That said, above 20 hours a week would be around the borderline. If I started playing more than that then I’d probably be addicted.
As a general rule when it starts interfering with your “higher priorities”, ususally career/family/friends. Calling off work using personal leave for a video game you waited 3 years for is ok. Using the last of your sick leave to get another day of gaming isn’t. Missing events with people you want to have a good relationship with isn’t.
This is a good rule of thumb for most addictions afaik.
IMO the question is more around when it starts having demonstrable negative effects on your life. Missing obligations to family and friends. Work getting done poorly. Not taking care of your own health. Stuff like that.
I totally agree. I used to have a problem with gaming growing up, I’d prioritize it over everything else and my studies really suffered as a result, but now? I spend almost as much time playing games as I did back then, but it’s an end-of-the-day post-resposiblities thing I do that allows me to spend time doing something with my wife even when we’re miles apart (like we frequently are). It all depends on the effect it is having on your life, not a matter of raw time spent on it.
I would state that this is the bar for determining if anything is an addiction. Does it make your life harder to manage or not?
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Something becomes an addiction when it is unreasonably difficult to stop doing it in order to address something you would consciously rate as more important. That could mean biological needs like food or sleep, social needs like work or seeing friends and family, or self-improvement like exercise or pursuing hobbies other than video games. It is not determined primarily by hours spent.
Of course if you have no other hobbies, never exercise, don’t have friends, and actively minimize other time commitments to maximize the time you can spend gaming, most people would consider your lifestyle imbalanced. That doesn’t make it an addiction though, and if you’re an adult, what kind of lifestyle you want is ultimately up to you.
“That could mean biological needs like food or sleep, social needs like work or seeing friends and family, or self-improvement like exercise or pursuing hobbies…”
Work has done all of this to me on repeated occasions, but I wouldn’t say I’m addicted to work.
Though… I suppose I am addicted to the resulting paycheck.
For work, the compulsion comes from outside, not from you. It’s not an addiction, it’s company profit intruding on your life.
Ok, well I definitely exercise (sometimes), have a lot of friends who I text though I never go out anywhere, and I try to do other things as well, so I would say I’m not addicted. TYSM :)
I suppose I would add that if you consciously want to do something less and can’t bring yourself to do so, that’s also addictive behavior. It doesn’t sound like that’s the case here though; you just like gaming. It’s OK to like gaming.
I’d say any more than about fifteen minutes a week, combined between phone, computer, gaming, and internet is overdoing it.
