23 years of age, I have an (short) addiction to games, as planned!

Note: Even though I tried my best to refine the document, it could still be quite hard to read and understand.

I thought that when I ‘play’ enough, I will temporarily cease to have desire for entertainment (*), so that I can focus on my work, my job, my life-long project. The thought is both True and False.

Two weeks ago, I felt frustrated after one week reading several research papers and working decently. I didn’t like the situation that I was always forced to work hard, to stay focused every single moment. Thus after such a quite hard-working week, on the weekend, I decided to stop forcing myself stay on the main track. That means I could do WHATEVER I (or my physical body, my mind) WANT. Of course, no choice was better than playing game, as my brain was still in use and I had interaction with something (which I didn’t have when reading papers or doing my job!).

I was engrossed in a Rogue game called Dead Cells in almost one day to complete a run. This game was so addictive, as I could fight with foes in the game and gain assets to upgrade my character. However, like doing anything else, playing game in a long time would deplete your health and desire to continue. My body soon losed interest in this game and I totally concentrated on working in the next week, as expected. Great! In fact, my body and my mind is fear to consume a lot of time on unnecessary stuff, including game. My action actually was to trigger the fearness, so that I could be back on the main track without any distraction.

One week later, I repeated the same process, but the result was different. I STILL WANTED TO PLAY during weekdays, seem to be because I got new items for my character and wanted to try it. At that time, I had two choice: one is to suppress my hunger for playing game, and another is to release it. The rationale for the latter seem to be stronger: “Seem that my body has not yet played enough! I need to play more to stabilize it - But you did play a lot during the weekend, why do you still want to play - I do not know, but if I have to mentally fight the distraction caused by my desire in order to stay on track, I would rather satisfy the desire first. Fighting with distraction actually perpetuates that distraction on your mind, no better than releasing it”. Thus, I chose to spend Tuesday and Wednesday’s afternoon of this week on the interest. I could say that I got addicted to Dead Cells, as planned!

Fortunately rule (1) held for Wednesday’s afternoon, and I had time to seriously analyse the problem. It seems that if my mind, my conscience don’t stop me playing game, my physical body will NEVER lose the interest even though my mind does feel guilty to do so. My body quickly gets adapted to my gaming habit that it can endure longer and longer playing time (and of course exceed 180 minutes :/). That means, while rule (*) still stands, its assumption does not - there may be the case that NEVER IS ENOUGH. This is a big problem!

Now, generalize my case into a broader context, what do I see? I see that there are a lot of temptations out there, waiting us to fall into. Sometimes we can shortly visit them for the sake of entertainment, experience, socialization, etc., but if we do not stay alert, try to ease ourselves by these unnecessary stuff, or in other word, our mind remains easy-going to our body, we - our body would soon never feel enough and hugely rely on them. That would be a miserable consequence! Therefore, to avoid the consequence, we - our mind had better (learn to) suppress our desire, should not often let us ‘play’ enough. Shouldn’t we complain that our parents or community are strict to us, or to force us to follow to moral standard, because without these reminders, we - our body find it easy to fall.

So, at the end of the day, which option would you choose? Suppress or release? For me, actually it’s still hard to say.