Oh sweet old Commodore!! How much i missed thee... where are thou for life i missed thee? Will never give up gaming and never tried. Not addicted either. Once i told my boss that a friend died and spent a few days finishing a RPG game. it was a slow week at work. hm.. addiction eh? got to think about that Nowdays, i play as part of learning about software engineering - Game UI and design. games are complex piece of software that may take $40m to make and publish. Yet a lot comes down to making everything so easy to pickup that players could figure 75%+ of the gaming rules and control in 5 min, without touching the manual. strange thing though, i listen to TV/cable/sat. shows while gaming... good thing i am on 6 months sabbatical leave. now i can call gaming - My Research. giving up gaming? never.
So these people who have given up or are planning to, how old are you and what's your situation? I'm just curious as i'm in my last year of school, so i don't have much better to do really, and yes study but i've got the self discipline of a salmon resisting swimming up stream. (go random analogies!) Uni starts in september or wahtever, might try and cut down then, but i still... So anyway, just wondering what kind of age and situation (married? kids?) is common to give up the ghost? Chars for sharing
I'm 20, been playing games since I was about 2.5 years old (yes, I realise that's a little crazy). I'm in college, doing last year of highschool and first year of university level stuff concurrently. I've polished off many books, and I've made it about 450 pages into Les Miserables, a book I've wanted to read for a fair while, in a week. When I was gaming last year, it took me about 4 months to read a 1200 page book, this one will take me 3 weeks tops. Not to mention that I don't seem to have much work to do, because I'm getting it all done so soon after it's given out (not got much better to do some of the time, tbh). I've also taken up Yoga (laugh all you want, it seems a good exercise for flexability and co-ordination) since giving up the games. I have started to watch BBC news online sometimes when eating my dinner, so I'm not sure if I'll end up slipping back into watching TV and various other media on my PC, but even if I do I'm happy with myself for having given up gaming. If I can stick not watching media on a regular basis that's just an added bonus. At this stage, I've been not gaming for 22 days. Doesn't sound like long, but it feels like it's been a fair while. It feels totaly normal not to be gaming now - I don't even have any games installed on this machine anymore. I don't miss it at all and I'd still reccomend that those who've been gaming for years analyse whether they actually enjoy games, or whether they just play video games because as a person, that's what they normally do. Obviously for me, if I'm not missing at all, I just wasn't getting much, if anything, out of it.
I quit gaming all together for qa bout a year when I started going out with my first girlfriend. I didnt really miss it because I had alot of other things on my mind. However a few girlfriends later I got married and back on the games. I found my girl and married her so now I dont need to kep her entertained every minute of the day lol. Took a while to catch up on games I missed out on during my withdrawl period. How every i have currently given up gaming almost altogether on PC and only played a few C&C games with Samkiller42 other the last few weeks which is pretty much the first time I played Pc games for over 1-2 years. Other than that I am going towards console gaming only now even though my gaming past has been mostly PC since my dads 286.
Gaming does seriously affect the amount I read, but I go in cycles of media anyway. Games, comics, books, I just loop round and round. It's the handhelds which really stop me reading and I have to make a deliberate effort to put them down and pick up some pages instead.
I 'retired' from gaming with the release of the Super NES back in the day. I was dropped back into it when my best friend bought me a Playstation when he was overseas in the service. Since then, I've returned to my gaming ways, only way more of a PC gamer than console. TV, I dropped basically with the cancellation of The X-Files, MST3K & Farscape. The only thing I occasionally watch at all now is Family Guy, American Dad & Robot Chicken. Scrubs, Battlestar Galactica, The Venture Bros., etc. I watch on DVD so I don't think it technically counts as "TV".
It's only been 2 weeks, but I really havent started up a game, school and work are getting in the way again, and in my spare time, i usually troll bit. The TV i watch is almost exactly what EEL said, except take out Battlestar Galactica and replace it with Top Gear.
6 weeks now. The only games I've played were at a LAN last weekend. I wasn't as good as I used to be (still pwned everyone in Trackmania and UT of course xD) but it was fun. I don't miss gaming at all anymore though* - I've started drawing quite regularly, and I'm still reading way more than I used to. I'm also on the net doing little of worth more than I used to, which is annoying but I suppose was kinda inevitable. One thing I've noticed is that, before when I used to try to make myself do new things apart from gaming I'd find them boring. That's because when you play games (pretty much any PC games) you can sit for 3-4 hours a time playing without getting bored. You can't do that with most other things. Books, arty movies, drawing, listening to music on it's own - most of these things tend to be good for a shorter ammount of time and then get boring (for me at least) - the trick to succesfullly adopting things like them is not trying to get a single thing to fill large parts of your day, but circulating and doing short ammounts of lots of different things. Anyway, not sure if I'll ever update this again. I pretty much consider myself "off" games now. But 6 weeks isn't that long in the grand scale of things so maybe in another month or two I'll update it again. * That perhaps seems silly to say considering I was at a lan a few days ago, but I'm continuing the lanning because I've been doing it for 5 years or so with the same group of guys, who I mostly only see at those lans, I enjoy the lans themselves as much as the gaming - and since numbers are generally on the low side I like to go to help make things fun. Games at home though just don't attract me though.
Nice effort Spec... You'll find it much better as the nights get lighter aswell, natural light makes reading a much more enjoyable experience, I quit TV when I was a couple of years older than you and I'm now 30 ... but gaming I've never been able to stop, as a casual gamer it's always been my bad weather pasttime... The hardest thing for me about TV was realising how much it forms the basis for everyone elses conversations, especially sport (guys) and soaps (girls) a bit of sweeping sexism but generally true.
No one in our house watches soaps or sport, both two things that are wrong with TV, that and reality TV.
In a similar way im getting back into PC gaming. Ive recently upgraded my rig and now considering playing some games ive missed out on like the Orange box and UT3. This is no means of spending stupid amounts of money on such a hobby but just another way of getting my entertainment back from the rig. Ill still be mostly playing on my 360 but i think all my gaming has been relegated to the weekends only. So no huge loss there then.
Can I move in? You got all three spot on I meant work colleagues, randoms you meet out and about, I'm on a building site at the moment and I have to borrow a copy of the Sun to check football match commentries or I'd be a complete coventry outcast... it's bad enough I don't support a 'Team' and like to windsurf (all the trades over 40 think it's the height of comedy to call me 'Dude')
I'm only 15, been playing games i shouldn't have ever since my (older) sister brought home a PS1 with Duke Nukem 3D, got hooked, bought my own N64 with christmas money and have been hooked since! I've just started, so i'd never quit!
TV I gave up ages ago..however TV-on-demand that's different, either on my PC or the TV it's awesome. Football on-demand is awesome aswell so I can watch the replay whenever I want like it's loaded in my DVD player or VCD player Computer games however is harder, it's just something I do when I'm bored at home and it entertains me. Now can anyone say they've given up PORN? ?!?! ! !1 1oneone
/boiled_elephant fiercely resists pointing out the correlation between being a 'true gamer' and not being able to spell or construct sentences
I haven't read the rest of the thread due to the time of day (2:35am) I quit gaming (kinda) for about a year in 2004. I sold my Xbox, bought a Mac (no sniggering!), PC at the time was a Pentium 3 550 and wasn't up to anything. During that period I got a hell of a lot more work done than before, I did it because gaming was taking over and College had to take priority. This went on for about a year as I said, then I met a guy at university who was a gamer / hardware geek and we had many lengthy conversations about hardware (generally the superiority of AMD64 and the inferiority of what he termed Crapples) as I had lost track of games. Some time later my future house mates persuaded me to buy a 360 (great thing peer pressure isnt it?) and I slowly got back into it, albeit when the TV wasn't in use. About 3 weeks ago I bought the system thats in my sig. got back into games and missed a coursework deadline The concept of quitting gaming is easy if you undergo a hardware change (probably wont work anymore with Macs being Intel based) but there was always something pulling me back into it. At first it was C&C Generals on my Mac. That descended into the adrenaline of the original UT which I found lying in my wardrobe which I discovered is still as good as it used to be. I don't quite know how i managed about a year without games.
