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.
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.
It isn’t a specific number of hours.
Addiction is a neuropsychological disorder characterized by a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behavior that produces natural reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences.
If it feels harmful seek help. If not, have fun.
Consider the following:
On the one hand. Slavery got repurposed and repackaged in a nice 9-to-5 format - 8 hours, so that we’d stop complaining. Compared to that, spending let’s say two hours on videogames is defo not bad.
On the other hand, we’re talking about Roblox, one of the largest brainrots around. There’s defo better stuff to engage in.
In the same way that your friend who drinks a couple beers a day after work is probably fine, you’re probably fine spending a few hours after work playing games.
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 for me. If I started playing more than that then I’d probably be addicted.
I play a lot.
I’ve finished a game and started playing it again immediately. It was Deus Ex (2000), so you know the Liberty Island mission is awesome. So, justified.
I actually had a dream last night that I was showing someone I could do the entire first mission with zero equipment, zero kills. (I can also do it zero detection, but that takes longer. And, not if I also want to rescue Gunther. That’s much harder. He also greatly interferes with a “no kill” rule.) So I run in, remark on how pixelated/low-poly everything is, and then as soon as I get on the island proper (off the dock) and hang a right to go around back, the remaster releases online and the graphics get noticeably better… and the game takes on elements of Cyberpunk 2077, so now I’m dealing with those threats as well, so it’s basically the Liberty Island mission reimagined in Cyberpunk.
I’ve also had a dream once I was stuck in Animal Crossing. It’s funny, when you first start the game, you fly into the island, but you can never actually leave it. Sure, you can visit other islands, but after 5AM you’re sent back home. Even if you pay the raccoons back and do all the home upgrades. (What you can do, within canon, is move to another island. But, you can never leave the islands and go back to civilisation. There are even some obscure hints within the game that you’re the last human, or one of the last humans. That’s a whole rabbit hole. And yes, I mean the kids game with fishing, farming, and animals for neighbors. It’s supposedly post-apocalyptic, but you never get to see it. Could even take place in the same universe as Fallout, for all we know.
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.
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.
I’d say any more than about fifteen minutes a week, combined between phone, computer, gaming, and internet is overdoing it.
