I was recently just like Peter. And for a long time.
I got into games when I was little and used to play a lot of Zelda 1. I used to play the games for fun, and being young, it didn't really interfere with anything.
I played Hockey for 9 years Baseball for 5, and Soccer for 6. I quit Baseball and Soccer some years before, and when I turned 17 I had become so obsessed with video games that I ended up quitting Hockey as well. I kept saying "Well, at least I can still write" - I was at the time a good writer (Had won an award at a reigon-wide young authors' conference, and read a lot of fantasy books; wrote LotR spinoffs when I was about 9), but...when I was 17, I had quit doing that, too. I was wrapped up in games, staying up until 3AM and still waking up at 7:30 for school.
As for passtimes, I ended up with nothing but playing hours upon hours of every Final Fantasy, Shining Force, Breath of Fire, and countless other games. I'd become unfit and eventually obese. I was 5'10" 225 lbs.; never cared to cut that out, either, because exercising meant less time to play video games. That was until two years ago when I decided to do something about it. Today I am 5'11" 165 lbs. and muscular again, back to the normal workout routine that I had ditched when I was playing hockey.
To draw comparisons, my brother also played hockey. When he was little, he played just as much Zelda as me. Today, he has a scholarship to a good University and is 6'2" 205 lbs. and has been an NHL prospect for a year; he's a year and a half younger than me.
I wanted to get a job writing video games (the Quest for Glory series' creators inspired me), and tried for years to get a demo out, but I was too wrapped up in playing games to learn how to program or use Photoshop or anything. I'd sit down and think for about 15 minutes before thinking to myself, "Maybe I can get some cool ideas from that new game I just bought".
Playing so many video games caused my grades to drop (I stopped caring to do homework) and I almost didn't finish high school. I got kicked out of my AP classes in 10th grade and never improved enough to .
From ages 16 to about a month ago, I worked low-pay jobs; all of my money went towards games and gas. I don't think I ever saved more than $10 per bi-weekly check, which was around $200.
Most of my family lives across the country now (my brother upstate, my sister holds a job as a medical rep all over the state, my little sister is a skier travelling to Austria and Norway and is in a camp in Oregon) so they hadn't seen the worst of it. In fact, a lot of them thought that I was over my problem since I had taken the liberty of exercising again, but they were wrong. Exercise took an hour a day, two hours at most. I still wasn't writing, either.
So, my family has achievers - a 4-year college grad, an NHL prospect on scholarship, and a skiing prodigy - and then me, living at home playing video games in my third year of college with an undeclared major.
When World of Warcraft came out, I wanted to make it a job. A friend of mine had made thousands of dollars one summer by playing Shadowbane and selling gold, and the summer after had made a good sum selling Star Wars Galaxies credits; I had anticipated World of Warcraft for so long that I went and bought 2 copies and started saving for a second computer (My current one cost me $2500 custom-built and I wanted to 'clone' it) so that I could play two characters at once, level them both fast, and sell gold to make cash. That fell through and I just ended up playing a lot. In fact, I took a week off of work and skipped classes the week it came out (I made lv50 in less than a week, was easily among the top 20 on the server, Warsong, that week). That continued to get worse until a few weeks ago. A month ago I decided it was time to quit; I would round off my next character and sell the account and be done.
Exams were creeping up and I wasn't ready. This was just last week. I have an exam tonight that if I wasn't up until 4:30 AM every night all weekend studying for (making up for lost time), I would be far from ready for. Last weekend, I played WoW for 20 hours in a 48 hour period because I wanted to finish off my character as fast as possible.
So there I was, lying in bed, thinking to myself, "So, am I going to be done?"
I had a little conversation with myself, too. I thought of how fast I might be able to get ANOTHER character to level 60, and up the worth of the account in as little time as possible. Then I laughed at myself, in disbelief that I couldn't balance WoW and school. There must be thousands of people who can and are, so why can't I? How can I deal with it?
I decided that there was one way to deal with it. At about 1:30am (early bedtime for me) I leapt out of my bed and put all of my games in boxes, knowing that if I just quit WoW, I'd pick something else up in its place; I'd play Guild Wars, or FFXI again, or any of the still-unopened games that I had lying around. I just put them all away, ready to say goodbye to all of those games forever and think back on it with fondness before they started creating horrible memories, or worse - locking me into an empty existence of emotional dependance on video games.
I woke up the next morning (I hadn't slept much) restless, but I was happier than I had been in a long time. I had uninstalled every game from my PC, and put all my games in a box out of reach. When I woke up, I wasn't thinking of seeing what I could do in WoW in a half an hour before I went to class, I was thinking about school. And in class, I wasn't thinking about what I could get done before the guild's MC run that night or what to spend my accumulated DKP on, I was thinking about the math problems on the board and plate tectonics. And when I got home instead of opening WoW, I sat down and did my homework and then watched a movie - the first movie I'd seen (in or out of theatres) since Kingdom of Heaven came out in theatres (granted, it was just a rental of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that was half-over).
I have awoken happier every morning since.
It's been said that people often replace it with worse things - but I am hoping that my strong stance against drugs and alcohol will prevent anything of the sort. I may still need to work some things out with a counselor, but I'm feeling good about myself today, and don't see myself getting worse. I've thought about going back once or twice, and I've thrown the idea out each time - I know exactly what would happen, and I don't want it.
