For several years I’ve been adamant about not buying a video game system. Growing up I played Nintendo (about every system they put out), Sega Genesis, Playstation, and Computer Games (boy was I addicted to Diablo) pretty much non-stop. It wasn’t until my first semester in college when I started going through a profound disillusionment with my current way of living that I made a resolution to stop playing video games (among other things). In many ways video games where simply a distraction from more important commitments, such as living a healthy life that was dedicated to giving back to the world rather than simply leaching off of it.
At some point in the past few months, and this might be because next week I’m leaving on a two-month meditation retreat, my position has changed. I want to re-integrate video games back into my life in a healthy way. Part of the reason I’m interested in doing so is because I have a strong appreciate for the tech world, and video games are an important part of that world. Another is because I think entertainment can be and is a vital part of living a full life. Of course, we all know that many people simply use entertainment to constantly keep themselves sedated to other dimensions of life, but this does not have to be the case.
Case in point: I was a heavy drinker for a few years, and at the same point that I quit playing video games I also stopped drinking. For nearly two years I had nothing to drink. When I turned 21 I decided I would try and re-integrate drinking back into my life (I’ve always loved the taste of good beer and wine), and since that time I have yet to drink more than 2 drinks in a night. I simply have no interest in getting into an altered state, and my relationship to alcohol is radically different.
I believe that one’s relationship to any addictive tendency can be throughly transmuted through a process of renunciation, transformation, and finally re-integration. There may be extreme cases where this isn’t so (such as with an addiction to a hard-drug or to harming others), but many minor addictions can be transmuted into powerful allies in living a more full and fun life.
January 26th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Can’t be done - take it from another former game addict. That initial excitement-obsessiveness, that faux adrenaline (not connected to something “real”), quickly gives way to a lingering emptiness (”WTF did I just do with my time??”), disgust sets in, you don’t touch another game for 4 months or so.
There just no easy way to leave the console - you have to say goodbye completely, with a couple of exceptions that prove the rule - like if you are playing Mario Party with others…
Sometimes it isn’t possible to integrate - a state of awareness may simply be antithetical to videogame playing. That lingering “sure would be fun” “I used to have fun, I can again”, reveals itself to be false fun.
Or, maybe that’s just me!!
January 26th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
I guess we’ll find out… If I ever choose to spend $300 on a video game system! That might actually be the bigger issue, cause nearly all of my extra money right now is definitely going in other directions.
But I sure did have fun playing in the arcade with a cousin of mine the other day. Perhaps it was just the context.