I wrote this text based on my own experience, as well as other sources like books and videos.
References are provided at the end of the text for those who wish to delve deeper into the subject.
1. THE ORIGIN OF AN ADDICTION
I recently started playing Final Fantasy Tactics A2. It’s a tactical RPG with simple fundamentals that become progressively more detailed over time.
The game doesn’t have exceptional graphics or a captivating story (in fact, the story is quite weaker than its predecessors), but it has highly addictive gameplay that makes you want to play more
I started this game on a Sunday and simply couldn’t do anything else throughout the day.
I spent the entire day thinking about it and how to equip my characters with the best abilities, how to build a balanced team, and how to acquire certain items to make my characters even stronger.
I also set myself a challenge: I would finish the game only with the initial characters, making it more challenging — after all, I couldn’t use any overpowered characters that appear later in the game.
The problem is that I couldn’t do anything else throughout the day. I woke up in the morning, started the game, played for hours, quickly ate lunch to get back to playing, and continued playing almost all day.
In the afternoon, I stopped briefly to go to church and couldn’t pay attention to anything happening there: I just wanted to go home and continue training my characters.
I’m still in this state. I spent all of Monday playing, and today (Tuesday) as well. I’ll probably continue like this, unable to do anything properly until I finish because of my hyperfocus.
But amidst all this, I wondered: why are video games so addictive?
2. HOW VIDEO GAMES WORK
Modern games have elements from all other arts: music, movies, series, literature… Take Skyrim, for example: it has incredible scenes worthy of films, various storylines like in series, orchestrated music that stays with you forever, and even in-game books that expand the game’s universe.
Besides the sensory explosion you experience when playing, you also have a sense of progression, of accomplishing something: when you play an RPG or adventure game, you get stronger, overcome increasingly difficult challenges, and feel like you’re achieving something. No addiction grips you more because you’re part of it: it’s an active addiction where you’re responsible for solving all the problems.
Don’t get me wrong: I love games, especially RPGs. But they are by far the type of media that most addict me. You can’t just play a game for an hour — a perfectly normal amount of time to read a book, listen to an album, or even watch a series episode — because sometimes an hour isn’t enough to do much.
And games are progressively becoming more complex and larger over time: today, besides having a main campaign, you might want to 100% complete it, collect all secret items, achieve all endings, unlock all characters, etc. It’s no wonder there’s so much addiction involved in this.
And the way they are today, they are completely made to addict you. You have a mission that gives you that rewarding feeling when completed, releasing dopamine in your brain. Then you see your stats and realize you just need to train a few more minutes to get stronger. Then you discover you can gather some items and create a sword that increases your attack by 30%… and before you know it, you’ve lost several hours playing.
3. VIDEO GAMES VS OTHER HOBBIES
The difference between video game addiction and addiction to other types of media is evident. Video games are much more addictive than anything else. Perhaps the closest would be a TV/streaming series.
Let me illustrate with some examples:
Books
When you read a fiction book, you have to overcome certain discomforts:
- Your neck hurts from being bent for a long time.
- You have to keep adjusting your position in your chair/bed constantly in a literary kama sutra.
- Sometimes the book is big and uncomfortable to turn pages.
- The letters in your edition might be small.
- The texture of the paper might be annoying.
Sure, you can solve the last three issues with an e-book reader, but the posture-related discomforts remain. That’s why it’s hard to keep reading a book for a long time. After a while, you need a break.
Additionally, I believe no art form is freer than literature because the author depends solely on themselves. I’ve talked about this before, and I’ll leave a link to that article at the end of the text.
Movies
When watching a movie, most of the time we have a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Few movies require you to see the next one to fully understand it (I can only think of Avengers 3 and 4), so we don’t feel the need to watch all the movies in a franchise one after the other.
It’s very common to hear people prefer watching several 50-minute episodes of a series than a movie.
If you go beyond blockbusters and look for something more “cult,” the films become a bit more complex to watch, requiring you to stop and think a bit to understand everything that happened.
Music
Nowadays, most people listen to music while working, going to the gym, washing dishes, and other activities. So stopping to listen to music seems like something from the Jurassic era. But in the old days, normal people like you and me would stop everything they were doing to listen to a music album with its 40, 50, 60, or more minutes.
Doing that seems impossible today: staying away from the phone, listening to the songs in order without skipping any tracks, reading the album’s booklet or information online. Stopping to listen to music requires a certain sacrifice, a bit of “sensory detachment” that seems absurd nowadays but was extremely common until shortly before digital music — speaking like this, I sound super old, but I started consuming music in the digital era, although I was a CD enthusiast since I started having my own musical taste.
Series
Perhaps the closest to games in terms of addiction: series have multiple episodes lasting from 30 to 80 minutes, and at the end of each, you always feel like watching the next.
There are basically two types of series: the lighter ones like sitcoms with short 30-minute episodes. You finish a light, humorous episode but want to watch the next to see if the overall story progresses and to laugh a bit more. The second type is the grander series: large episodes of 50 or 60 minutes ending in a cliffhanger that makes you want to watch more. It’s common to see people binge-watching entire seasons in a single day — that’s what I did when watching Game of Thrones.
Here we already have a much more passive hobby: the plot is given to you, you just need to pay attention to the plot twists, the points fitting together. There’s less room for interpretation than in good movies and certainly much less character depth than in books.
And of course, there are great exceptions like Breaking Bad, Dark, and Black Mirror (which is a very particular style of series with each episode standing alone), but most series follow this path, being made for the masses and therefore having a “leveling down” nature with increasingly superficial stories — just look at how Game of Thrones’ script worsened as the series’ popularity grew.
Social Media
Lastly, it’s worth a brief mention of social media. I say brief because I’ve already written an exclusive text about them, and I’ll leave the link to it in the last section of the text.
Social media are everything that’s worst in all addictions: almost instant stimulation with 15-second videos full of colors, music, small stories, curiosities, and sexualization. Of course, I don’t consider social media a hobby — unless you use it to create something — but I thought it was worth clarifying how it is the worst in terms of stimuli.
4. THE BEHAVIOR OF A VIDEO GAME ADDICT
Recently, I watched a video by Luke Smith (you can find it at the end of the text) discussing the difference between the behavior of a colleague of his who was addicted to books and how that differed from a video game addict’s behavior.
According to him, the girl could easily talk about other topics normally when she wasn’t reading her books. She was a normal person socially speaking. On the other hand, a video game addict becomes so immersed in their game that they only want to stay within it even when not playing. That’s why it’s common to see highly addicted people who lack social skills for more everyday topics.
I think this is easily observable, especially when talking about younger players: when we’re young, it’s much harder to be moderate in pleasures, so it’s relatively common to see boys who play a lot from an early age fixated only on video games.
Over time, these people become apathetic to the outside world, eager to return to the online RPG, MOBA, or that endless sandbox game. I know this because I was like that for a long time: I spent hours and hours playing RPGs alone in my room.
Of course, not everyone is like this, and many people manage to have a healthy relationship with games (I’ll talk about this below), but for many, spending 4, 5, 6 hours in front of the computer is normal. When would spending 6 hours reading books be normal? Or 6 hours watching movies one after the other? But for some reason, we feel very tempted to keep playing. That’s why I think it’s so worrying when a person becomes so addicted to games, which is even more common in online games.
5. CONCUPISCIBLE APPETITE VS. IRASCIBLE APPETITE
To better understand why video games are so addictive, I think it’s essential to delve into the philosophical side of things. Saint Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica (First Part of the Second Part, question 23), defines two concepts: concupiscible appetite and irascible appetite. I’ll provide a link to the Summa at the end of the text. I don’t know if he coined these terms, but they are extensively discussed in his work.
The concupiscible appetite deals with the sensible pleasures we have: food, sleep, sex, and other such things. The irascible appetite, on the other hand, is oriented towards less tangible goods that require some effort to acquire, like a professional achievement or a sports competition.
Games primarily affect the concupiscible appetite: they provide numerous stimuli (as I mentioned earlier) that aim to keep you experiencing a series of pleasant sensations, a sense of achievement. There is no “arduous good” obtained by completing a game — except for those e-sports championships, which require intensive training.
Since humans thrive on stimuli, when we receive only concupiscible stimuli, it is natural for us to become increasingly focused on sensible pleasures, neglecting the pursuit of arduous goods found in real life.
The curious thing is that games achieve this even though gaming is a more “active” activity since you need to take action for the game to progress. However, this is a false activity because it doesn’t require anything significant to be completed, perhaps better described as “passive activity.”
In video games, there is an appearance of activity since we feel we are achieving things by completing missions and leveling up, but in reality, these are just gamification mechanisms that break down large tasks into smaller ones and keep us wanting to continue participating in the game.
That’s why games are so engaging, and we end up getting more and more absorbed in them. Over time, they become even more interesting than what’s happening around us, which seems so devoid of stimuli. The result is that we become apathetic over time, just like I did on the Sunday when I started playing Final Fantasy Tactics A2.
I already mentioned this above, but it’s worth reiterating the comparison: with books, listening to an album, or other hobbies, there is a certain effort; you need to master a bit of technique, even if it’s passive (reading and listening to music). For example, you need to concentrate to pay attention, find a quiet environment, among other things. Thus, even while experiencing concupiscible pleasure (from the senses), you need to engage your irascible appetite (the positive feeling of doing something challenging).
With video games, it’s different: everything there is designed to grab your immediate desire: the colors, the graphics, the music, and especially the gameplay. It’s not hard to progress in a game; even the more challenging ones always give you a taste of “I want more.” And there’s an appearance of insatiable appetite: you face just the right amount of difficulty to give you the feeling of wanting to try again, and when you manage to get through that tough stage, you’re ready to continue playing for hours and hours.
6. THE NEED FOR LEISURE
When we talk about attachment to the senses, it’s worth taking a moment to explain another important point: when you are constantly entertaining yourself and filling every minute of your life with activities, you lose a bit of leisure time, which is so necessary — and undervalued — these days.
In our way of life, increasingly concerned with “productivity” and “efficiency,” having time to do nothing might seem absurd. But it’s not so absurd when you think about how we spend hours and hours of our day watching those short TikTok videos.
Therefore, allowing yourself some time to be bored and do nothing is good, I assure you! Whether it’s something intentional (for example, 15 minutes of meditation or prayer every day) or something beyond your control (like when your phone dies while you’re out). That’s why so many people have brilliant ideas in the shower or just before falling asleep: for most people, these are the only moments of leisure in their lives.
So don’t worry so much about having a bit of idle time. Great geniuses of humanity only managed to create their works because they were forced to live with leisure. To learn more about the role of leisure in creativity, read the recommended article at the end of this text.
7. IS IT POSSIBLE TO HAVE A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP WITH GAMES?
This brings me to the question: do you need to stop playing? Or is it possible to have a healthy relationship with video games? Given my personality, I consider it best to distance myself from everything related to games (since I can’t stop playing once I start). But I always return to play some classic RPG, losing myself for 2 or 3 weeks, and I also believe there are some things you can try to continue playing without harming yourself too much:
- Play offline games: When you play an online game, you can’t stop. Most online games require a lot of training to improve or grinding to make your character stronger. This takes up your time absurdly; it’s much better to play something with a beginning, middle, and end (even though many of these can also be addictive).
- Stop caring about trophies: Completionists like to finish the game 100%, doing absolutely all the side-quests, which ultimately awards a trophy/achievement certifying that the player completed everything. But at what point does this stop being fun and become a chore? Besides diminishing your enjoyment of games, you’ll spend much more time (and worse, collecting a bunch of useless items that won’t unlock anything more in the game). So, stop caring about these trophies and achievements and focus on the main game.
- Try arcade-style games: Arcade games or older games with limited lives can be an interesting challenge if you’re one of those who can’t put down the controller. When you lose all your lives and have to start over, stop playing. This forces you to play with more skill while having limited gaming sessions. I know it might seem like a bad idea, but once I did this playing Captain Commando and enjoyed it a lot. Unfortunately, I didn’t persist until the end, but it was cool to see how I played better over time.
But if none of these measures help, it might be time to take a break from this hobby and try something else. It’s not bad to stop playing, especially since you have a very interesting life to live outside. And maybe, in the future, when you have a bit more moderation, you can enjoy them in a healthier way.
I know I might sound like that annoying uncle who simply doesn’t want you to play video games, but it’s not like that: I want you to see if this isn’t harming your personal relationships. If you’re one of those who gets so immersed in games that you don’t eat lunch with your family, don’t know anything about what’s happening with them, or maybe are distancing yourself from your wife because of it… it might be time to reconsider.
The world of games can be so attractive that it makes real life seem dull, giving us a sense of apathy and weariness with everything in the real world. Life wasn’t meant to be this way, no matter how crazy the world is. There are things to experience, and it’s worth living life out there, getting a job, finding a girlfriend, hanging out with friends…
I’m not that old, exactly 30 years old, and I can say that many times I preferred playing video games over seeing my friends. Nowadays, I think I could have made better use of my adolescence. Maybe this is your case, and I don’t want to scare you with thoughts like “stop playing or you’ll never have a life,” but I want you to think: “to what extent can I continue as I am without deeply harming my social relationships?”
8. ADDITIONAL MATERIALS
Below are some additional materials you can read to understand more about the subject:
Deleting Social Media: 7 Reasons to Stay Away from Social Networks. Victor Kron. Available by clicking here.
On the Necessity of Leisure. Victor Kron. Available by clicking here.
Literature is the Only Free Art. Victor Kron. Available by clicking here.
Why I am so Anti-Video Games? Luke Smith. Video available here.
Summa Theologica, Treatise on the Passions of the Soul (especially questions 22 and 23). Available by clicking here.